28 Jan FMYLidó Rico symbolically used “the juggling and entrepreneurial effort” of the furniture industry’s working families to create the 63rd FMY poster.
The juggler, a metaphor of Yecla’s entrepreneurial effort and self-improvement, is the symbol of this edition’s slogan “I sit, therefore I sense”.
THE PRESENTATION TOOK PLACE IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHURCH
The San Francisco Church was the selected venue for presenting the 63rd edition of the Yecla Furniture Fair (FMY), an event which will be held this year under the slogan “I sit, therefore I sense”. The advertising graphics have been developed by José Ramón Lidó Rico, an artist from Yecla whose work has been displayed all over the world.
The presentation was attended by the President of the FMY Executive Committee and mayoress of Yecla, Remedios Lajara, as well as bythe director of the event,Juan Miguel Zornoza; the autor of the graphics, José Ramón Lidó Rico, and the Director General for the Promotion of Trade, Business Innovation and Craft Industries and Trades of the Region of Murcia (CARM), Rafael Gómez.
It is worth highlighting the staging which was done by FMY for the presentation, a transformation of the San Francisco Church into a space filled to the brim with lyricism. The stage, which was surrounded by sawdust crates, provided both material and metaphorical access to the world of furniture by filling the whole place with its characteristic smell. The staging served as a metaphor for the “nuclear” element of the industry and its versatility. A presentation and staging that has become a unique experience for the senses.
When talking about Lidó Rico’s poster, Zornoza highlighted the following: “We have made a qualitative leap. This year’s approach is totally different to the previous editions, since we have opted for a focus on art and emotion.” Later, Zornoza added: “We are showcasing art, the art that our industries are capable of creating. We are also exhibiting emotion, the emotion that all our city’s manufacturers and craftspeople put into their work”.
Indeed, this year’s advertising graphics are, in every sense of the word, a work of art, not only a poster. To represent this 63rd edition, Lidó Rico has conceived an ad hoc work of photography full of symbolism and poetry, in which the projected figure of himself as a juggler, created by using photoluminescence techniques, represents the furniture manufacturers. This artistic sense builds a metaphor that represents those entrepreneurs from Yecla that, with great effort and self-improvement, have made both the city and the Region of Murcia the heart and soul of the industry.
In his presentation, the artist explained that his work “aims to talk about people and emotions by combining the past—which is portrayed in the balancing act that many families had to overcome over the years to move their businesses forward— with a latent present—as Yecla represents the best example of the driving force that any city of the future aspires to.”
This year’s slogan, “I sit, therefore I sense” (in Spanish “Asiento, a veces siento”) is strongly present in Lidó Rico’s poster. In it, he played with the idea of “Sensing” (“siento”), as the emotional side that has always been linked to FMY and Yecla, and the concept of “sitting” (“asiento”). This second concept serves as an idea related to the origins and the base, as well as calling back to the original piece of furniture, a tangible product which is directly related to the businesses of the family of furniture, timber and related industries.
Lidó Rico, whose family origins are also connected to the furniture industry, used another metaphor to describe the background of both the industry and the fair, both of which founded on “solid roots that have helped grow the log of an industry whose branches keep on sprouting and prospering without any limits”, as seen on the 63rd edition’s graphics.
This year’s poster poetically shows a fair that, in the words of Lidó Rico, “has a warm flavour of newborn sawdust in its surname. Behold the red fragrance of the chairs that my hands hold; the magic of their acrobatics, in them there are no shadows but dreams, because under the fire of perseverance and expertise there is no darkness at all. Raise your eyes to contemplate those pirouettes and you might discover that the yearnings of prosperity crystallise between fortune and certainty”.
When talking about the author of the poster, the Director General of Trade Promotion, Business Innovation and Craft Industries and Trades, Rafael Gómez, said: “Undoubtedly, the icing on the cake of this 63rd edition of Yecla Furniture Fair has been the possibility of having an artist of such national and international renown as Lidó Rico participate.” Drawing a parallel, he also pointed out that the poster’s author stands for “all those families that, generation after generation, have been working in the furniture industry across the different factories. These families have provided Yecla’s furniture industry with a reputation of reliability, guarantee, quality and prestige both at a national and international level, just like the prestige that Lidó Rico also enjoys.”
Finally, the President of the Executive Committee and mayoress of Yecla, Remedios Lajara, closed the event by highlighting “the unconditional support from other administrations, in this instance the regional government, through the regional Ministry, the Directorate General and the INFO.” To which she also added: “It is the duty of the administrations, and I want to highlight that word, duty, to back successful models such as the Yecla Furniture Fair. It is also duty-bound to give value to our industrial network, in all its areas, from innovation, design, production and manufacturing, to transport, marketing and related industries, all of which, together with the Yecla Furniture Fair, make what happens in Yecla so unique”.
LIDÓ RICO: AN ARTIST EXHIBITED AROUND THE WORLD
Lidó Rico (Yecla, Murcia, 1968), studied Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of San Carlos in Valencia and graduated in 1991 from the École Superieure du Beaux-Arts du Paris. Since 1989 his award-winning works have been referenced everywhere from Spain to Colombia, from Hungary to Egypt. He has held exhibitions in Spain, Italy, Japan and the United States, as well as at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía National Museum and in various institutions such as the Spanish Bank Madrid Collection, as well as in public and private collections.
He is a leading exponent among the artists who currently use the concept of the body as a site of conflict. His work is pulsing with concern for the human being and the identity in the contemporary society, which can be seen reflected with the use of the body as a tool and central element in his work.
His artistic production, which always stems from the sphere of his own emotions, could be defined as the duality of the subject and the object, the performance and the sculpture, and his proposal is a lucid gaze when it comes to transcribing the dissolution of the hegemonic concept of the human being.
Some close examples of his artistic production can be found in the ‘quejío’ which appeared on the poster for the LXII Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas, in which he captured “the instant of duende (spirit) in which the cantaor (flamenco singer) delivers what he holds in the depths of his soul”; or in the poster for the Fiestas Patronales de Yecla in 2017, which symbolically portrayed a mother with her child, breaking with the tradition of the Virgin being at the centre of the image.
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