Smells have a nostalgic component that, for me, connects them to our most private and hidden facets. For two reasons: smell has no language in which it can be more or less formally transcribed and, for that very reason, each of us retains our memory of a smell as a vital and untransferable reference.

Every time I go to Quesa — the little town in rural Valencia that is the connection between the roots and the tree of my genesis — in winter, a memory that I cannot share switches on inside me: wet shoes, cold feet and a red nose, hands chopping the air with watery eyes, silence and walls whitewashed with lime; the smells of the fire, of carob pods, smoke, fog and frost in the morning, frozen earth…

This — to me — feeling of freedom can only be transmitted by way of a parabolic and distorted metaphorical discourse of an emotion that, if I were to ask anyone else about that smell, in that same place, on that same date, they would perhaps give an outline of their feeling, imprecise, like mine.

So, we are all messengers of an indecipherable message, which ends up being an unintentional secret of a childhood that survives as a paradigm of understanding between the self and the world.

The representation of Hermes as a young man with golden proportions, in marble shading into the nacre velvet of bare skin, gives a volatile sense of being. Lofted by the small wings on his heels and head, Hermes takes to the air through time to be lost in transparency, disappearing and reappearing anywhere, at any moment. The world of ideas steals out from behind the stretcher and manifests itself in the white of the paint, bringing within the bounds of its transparency the colours that guide me in expressing the world.

At times I have seen again, as my nose breathed in the cold winter air, the message wrapped in the crystalline transparency of my body: like all of us so often, Hermes somewhere.

Jesús Galdón