The Casita Azul of CentroCentro Cibeles will host until next January an exhibition dedicated to the work of Fernando Higueras in the Canary Islands, particularly focusing on one of his most famous constructed works on the islands, the Las Salinas Hotel.
Died in 2008, Higueras has left many memorable tracks in Madrid, some as extraordinary as the Center for Artistic restorations or "Crown of Thorns" or the Housing in San Bernardo, and numerous houses and other cases of interest. All these works deserve specific revisions but due to their proximity, is not them to whom this exhibition is dedicated but to present another facet of Higueras’ work, more exotic and distant as the projects and works he developed in the Canary Islands throughout his career. A set of works, many of them little known or presented here for the first time, which complements the more confined urban vision of the projects in Madrid and reveals a parallel experimental laboratory.
This "exotic laboratory" begins with the first contact between Higueras and César Manrique in 1960, and blooms in a lush set of proposals that shaped a complete program for the redescription, from architecture, of the landscape, the image, the character and the posible modes of employment (from playful to the cultural and from the tourist to the native aspects of architecture), of the Canary Islands and especially Lanzarote. A program of an enlightened ambition that glimpsed a prosaic, real-Eden; a pragmatic utopian future of the islands that few could see forty years ago and Higueras planned with reasons, ideas, metaphors and especially with a bunch of exemplary interventions whose current state can be checked by any visitor who comes to La Mareta, Las Salinas, the Spinola Palace and Lake Martiánez interventions. A both allegorical and operating imaginary that not only shaped these important cases but that has been a privileged material for others to understand the Islands and their possibilities. Of these projects, perhaps the Las Salinas Hotel summarizes the most powerful landscape project of Fernando Higueras in the Canary Islands and to which the core of this exhibition is dedicated.
Dates.- from October 6th, 2015 to January 10th, 2016.
Location.- CentroCentro. Plaza de Cibeles, 1. 28014 Madrid.
