Works experience the life that we give them. Although we often imagine them in isolation, like a lonely tree or a single god, when we place two or more side by side, notions of hospitality, tolerance and sympathy come into play. Their wild side and their sociable side allow the works to go half and half in forming the figure that we define for them or they define for us. In that sense the work almost seems like a person: a human being or at least almost human.

Another question. Through our little field of manoeuvres we want to testify to a community of life and culture with the same lack of awareness, strength and naturalness with which it was created. Is it possible to testify to that without publicising it? Is it possible to express it with fervour and discretion and a large dose of imagination as the authors of that community managed to do? Because we are not talking about a product or an asset but about the very spirit, or something that belongs to the spirit, of this corner of the world. And every corner of the world has its own life. It is the secret life of forests and of cities. It is an inexhaustible source that never ceases to flow.

Both Manoeuvre and the book Mareperlers i ovaladors ('Mother-of-pearl craftsmen and oval makers') from which it sprang have been based on this shrinking or, some might say, startled present. That is the reason for this unashamed paean to calm, broodiness (brooding over a particular place) and the urgency of touching the world again and dealing with any specific geography. Apart from our human condition, it is now the time to defend our earthly condition, and the Baroque rurality of our land is a good model for it.

Most of the couplings of the works we propose unveil the earthliness, autarchy and peasant and civic civilisation of a patient underfield that crosses and weighs them up.

The Manoeuvre is a line of works. The idea of touching the world has been applied to the contiguous nature of the works, with the desire for contact and exercises in the transmission of touch that the works can offer among themselves. We have therefore laid them out in a line, without the protection of a frame and including several preparatory drawings, as if all works were preparations for all works. This is the reason why, in order to look deeper into that, we have obsessively insisted on the same artists and the same anonymity, like someone beating an egg on a plate with numerous light, golden, joined elliptical motions, with a point of flow, of sequence, like a blank altarpiece.

I thank the works for the spirit and availability. Thank you, works, thank you.

The Manoeuvrer