CURRENT
Fermín Jiménez Landa - “La primera vez ya era una repetición”
What slips past us in daily life can, on closer inspection, open into something altogether different. For Fermín Jiménez Landa, this act of looking again is not a minor adjustment but the very core of his practice. La primera vez era ya una repetición (Even the First Time Was a Repetition) unfolds subtle ruptures in the everyday: actions that echo and shift, objects that refuse to be what they first appear. His works are less finished artefacts than fragments of ongoing processes: materials shaped through friction with the world, gestures and walks that loop back on themselves in order to reframe reality.
On a slightly dysfunctional railing (Pretexto para un retraso, 2025), the artist’s own watch is tied in place, inaccessible for the duration of the exhibition. It lags eight minutes and twenty seconds behind: the precise time it takes sunlight to travel to Earth.
Models of swimming pools (El Nadador, 2013) recall a project in which Jiménez Landa swam from pool to pool, from Tarifa to Pamplona, echoing the feat in John Cheever’s story. They also reveal his fascination with those prefabricated pools planted upright beside secondary roads, replicas of imagined natural paradises. Here, the models are turned towards the wall, their unmistakable pool-blue reflected through the gaps.
Two chairs, precariously balanced (Contrapeso, 2023), support plants that grow outside the logics of human design. In one window, two loaves of bread (Compañía, 2019) embody walks between the artist’s home and a local bakery: dough carried in his pockets, reshaped by the journey, then baked on arrival. In the other window, a small selection from an ongoing soap collection (Quiromántico, 2013–) shows pieces gifted by friends, worn thin through daily use until they survive as fragile remnants. Each bears the trace of repeated, everyday gestures.
Photocopies scattered on the floor (Mi nombre es Lucía, 2025) draw out the tension between original and copy—a long-standing concern in art, here transposed into the realm of real estate speculation. Gathered from his own mailbox and those of his neighbours, these letters affect spontaneity and urgency, as though pressing the recipient into believing a deal is within reach.
Between the ordinary and the improbable, between repetition and change, each work opens a detour—an invitation to see reality at a slightly different angle.