STONE / serie cantos
rodados |
The series "Cantos Rodados" of Fernando Castro is at once minimal and poetic. "Cantos rodados" correctly translates as "rolling stones," but since "cantos" also means "songs," the phrase amounts to "songs that have traveled." Rolling stones "talk" or "sing" as the river currents drags and tumbles them giving them a rounded shape. The flat circular stones in this series are part of a collection of skipping stones gathered by the artist at the shores of different bodies of water around the world: Lake Titicaca, Walden Pond, the Mediterranean Sea, etc. The resemblance of these images of stones to planets floating in the emptiness of their paper support suggests that each of the places from which they were picked is a world unto itself. A person that hurls the stone into the waters of the Pacific Ocean to watch it skip connects to another person in the Gulf of Mexico by that universal act of playfulness, experimentation and wonder. This collection of cantos is a father-to-son legacy that purports to draw a pilgrimage that the latter may undertake if he wishes to retrace the journeys of the former. The circularity of the stones intimates the possibility of a recurring cycle where one generation skips the stones of the preceding one and collects its own stones that its offspring might skip in the future. Thus, Castro's work is also about choice, continuity, innocence, and experience. |