On Campus. Houses of Cards Exhibition

House Of Cards
by Fernández Hurtado 

Exhibition visitable at IE Creativity Center
4th Feb-4th March 2021
Produced by IE Campus Life as part of IE Humanities Week 2021 
 

The most important events occur in the midst of the daily chaos, unnoticed by the eyes of the majority. The message always remains hidden.

(Peter Brueghel)
 

Life is vast and complex, a marvelous microcosm where the important things often occur beneath the surface of things. We are but a single card interdependent on others, all submerged in a vast deck of cards. If we build our dreams on a cloud, if we try to anticipate what may come while losing sight of the metre in front of our eyes, the unpredictable wind of life can topple our castles.
 

We form a whole - that is a fact - and we are decoding a new paradigm - learning period. In the most technological era in recorded history, we have arguably spent decades building life like a house of cards, that is, without paying attention to interdependence with other beings while ignoring the power of unpredictability.
 

The immovable and the ephemeral have not been in our popular culture the two sides of the same deck. As excited as we used to be, we have seen how the flutter of a butterfly can sweep away an entire generation. We must always be attentive, live and take hold of uncertainty, constantly adapt to a changing environment, not mortgaging our lives if it is not in chance, risk and mutation, for we are a constant becoming. Mishaps are part of our being, they will keep coming, we will hit rock bottom a thousand and one times because we don't really need that false security.
 

Alberto Fernández Hurtado is Professor in Residence of Art and Thought at IE Creativity Center where he has been working weekly with international students from a wide range of backgrounds and interests since 2016. He began his career as a multidisciplinary artist after studying Illustration at the Escuela de Artes y Superior de Diseño "Casa de los Picos" in Segovia, and after a self-taught training he entered the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. With an overwhelming plastic art, a precise drawing and a highly attractive capacity to portray the ephemeral in each of us, he has been turning his work towards happening and the casual incidence of the environments on which he works for months. His work is distributed in a multitude of public and private entities, as well as in different private collections, although the mark of his abilities begins to show in the change he provokes in each individual with whom he works.
 

The work on display here is a collection of thirty-seven oil paintings on canvas and board, initially intended to hang on the walls of the IE Creativity Center's exhibition hall. True to his recent innovative impulse, the artist proposes not only a reinvention of the theme - let us not long for our elders, but learn from the lessons of their loss - but also a diametrically opposed organisation to the usual. Formally - there are no posters or information about the works, and the portraits reinvert their classic raison d'être - but also experimentally, as the works act as a kind of sculptural happening, inviting the visitor not only to surround, but to live and experience what is exhibited from all the angles of our individual - and collective - being.
 

This exhibition has no aesthetic pretensions. It is a journey through the final stages of creation of a major artist whose story we hope will inspire. The presence of the arts has become fundamental for institutions such as IE University because of the importance of the Humanities, Art and Creativity in the formation of more sensitive and inclusive human beings.
 

This exhibition was made possible thanks to IE Campus Life and is part of the Humanities Week organized every year by the institution, and is one of the contributions of the IE Creativity Center - a free, bilingual, public space.