Ofrenes
Museu Pollensa
Rafa Forteza
July - October 2025
“Every seed already holds a premonition of what is to come.”[1]
Perhaps the origin of a particular artistic practice is nothing more than the invention of a problem. Rafa Forteza (1955, Mallorca) carries problems with him, from place to place. “Untamed mind,” read one of the recent drawings hung in his studio during the preparation of this exhibition...
He also carries seeds. Some in his pockets, others resting on the studio table, among wood shavings or paint stains. They don’t always germinate, but they mark a rhythm. Sometimes, they grow where least expected. In his new exhibition at the Museu de Pollença, these seeds come together as if preparing an offering. A way of laying something before us: a gesture, a trace, a question, a problem.
María Zambrano imagined thought in vegetal terms, as something that grows slowly in the shadows, rooted in the invisible. For her, thinking was not about building structures, but attending to what germinates: allowing what is already latent to find its shape. The seed contains within itself all that can be. It only needs, like thought, time and silence to sprout.
Here, the seed is symbol and threshold. A tiny object that holds within it a possible world. A dormant form. Eyes, noses, mouths gaze out from inside the sculptures. Rafa holds them between his fingers like a talisman, returning them to his practice in an almost liturgical gesture. They are archive and oracle. What has already been, and the premonition of what is to come.
The exhibition opens with two unique large-format books displayed on stands, inviting visitors to turn their pages. Each leaf a drawing, a sort of diary unfolding the everyday life of the studio. The drawing does not speak, but lets us hear something. It displaces. It does not say, but summons. That gesture itself is an offering.
A shaft of light, like a curtain to pass through, leads us to the center of the space, where about twenty recent sculptures rise at different heights, forming an irregular weave. Visitors can walk among them until they lose themselves in the landscape of faces looking in different directions. The face is a representational impulse, something always unfinished that demands to be revisited again and again.
On either side, two old tables brought from the studio serve as archives. They are also work altars, open laboratories. Upon them, objects that seem not to want to be seen, but simply to be. Seeds, pieces of wood, traces of the process. On these, Rafa has arranged small sculptures fixed on white bases, which otherwise would be a flux of materials. From half an avocado seed to the heart of a date, passing through the crown of a pomegranate. Small dried fruits or the spiral, always perfect, of an empty snail shell. Within this small archive, there is a subtle search for principles, for what might be...
At the end of the route, two paintings from the 1990s, from the Colliure series, close the exhibition like an echo. In them, the circle as a persistent sign, the gesture as a memory of death. A final fold.
Offerings does not propose a narrative, but a field of resonances. An atmosphere. As in any ritual, what matters is not so much what is offered, but the act of offering. That silent giving. That is what the works are made of: small beginnings, folds, drifts, and emerging forms. Insistent questions. And as in any field, the seed remains: discreet, powerful, dormant, awaiting its own time.
[1] María Zambrano, Philosophy and Poetry, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1987 (originally published 1939).