Jorge Méndez Blake
November 22, 2025 - February 15, 2026 | Travesia Cuatro, Madrid
Gonzalo Lebrija and Jorge Méndez Blake went to the Costa da Morte and brought back something they did not know they were looking for: lighthouses. Or rather: one imaginary lighthouse, made up of little bits of all the lighthouses—like a synthesis of all of them into one. They could have gone to Cornwall or Brittany or Cork, even to Tierra del Fuego or Nova Scotia, without bringing back the lantern of Lariño, or the sirens of Finisterre, or the light of Silleiro, and instead bringing back other lanterns, other sirens, and other light beams, and the result would have been much the same. Is what we feel when we look out onto the sea from any of the lighthouses mentioned really different from what we feel at any other lighthouse? Thinking that the answer is “yes” would turn us into mere stamp collectors. It is not the case.
Jorge Méndez Blake and Gonzalo Lebrija have traveled to the Costa da Morte at night precisely for that reason: daytime infatuation gone, mysteries reveal themselves in their full indecipherability. The candle that once gave light before it was snuffed out, the incandescent silhouette of a boat crossing the horizon, the luminous crown of a tower in the middle of the Atlantic, the imagined conversations between sailors and lighthouse keepers… without their cold presence, without their Beckett-like solitude, without their words—or our own—to point out what transcends us, Finisterre would not even have a name. As stated in one of the dialogues of the exhibition: lighthouses, fractions of hope, flickering over the horizon. “The fog surrounds us,” says one sailor in the same dialogue. “And our light traps us in it,” answers another.