From then on, my kite flights, which are perhaps not as frequent as I would like, feed my soul in a rhythmic way. The thing is that Beatrice and I received letters from Familásia*(from Uncle Raimundo – Beatrice’s daddy), from her uncles Amelia and Linuos, and from her cousins Sherezade and Lucca), to congratulate us on the accomplishment of such a memorable feat.

Tio Raimundo and I maintained a fluid and intense correspondence, where we wandered and studied the ups and downs of ecological flying artifacts. The helical flying car was practically ready. The mutant chicken feathers provided by the mole man proved to be strong and light enough as we expected, and the evolved pedal system corresponded in practice with the preliminary studies.

Everything was ready; at the end of September Beatrice, our Saint cat and I, would take the flight to Familasia. In the preparations, my head joined the stories that Beatrice told me about her family with the telephone conversations I had with them and with the letters where they related their memories and hobbies… Everything created, together with my imagination, a mysteriously slow seasoned broth that accelerated my heart with the enthusiasm of knowing them. And the long-awaited day arrived: finally together in the air!

At first Santo gave some problems: dizziness, nervousness and various scratches, but later everything went smoothly. First we crossed the Sierra de los Gigantes, and we witnessed a vision that only gods and eagles can enjoy. We felt an energetic cold – of life! – that sometimes froze our smiles and a few tears of happiness. Later on we flew over the immense turquoise blue of the Tantric Sea, where the hours needed to cross it were taken advantage of so that Beatrice could relate some more experiences of Family. In the silences of my beloved I felt that it was my heart that moved the propellers.

Hours later, after a time that passed more than fleetingly, we spotted land. Little multicoloured mountains were happily breaking the horizon… I never imagined such a beautiful land! We were entering FAMILY…

Blinky Rotred, the Comet Man

*Name by which we designate, both his family, and the island where they live.

With THEWELCOME, his latest work (shown in Madrid at the Galería Blanca Soto in June 2006), José Luis Serzo ventured (or adventure, since it is still an open series, like all the others, he says) in the search of a being “unequivocally welcome to whoever meets him”, and launched a forceful proposal for the spectator, in the game of brave fable towards a positive and necessary being..,

With FAMILY, we will also find a story, where the characters could even function as “dáimones”, those beings that act as links of union or mediating agents between the material world and the “soul of the world”, which the Neoplatonics called, and that centuries later Jung, studied with his “collective unconscious” and his “psychic reality”.

Blinky Rotred, the comet man, travels with his beloved Beatrice to FAMILY ISLAND, a remote place where her peculiar family lives. There, Tio Raimundo, Beatrice’s father, an intrepid adventurer, ethnologist and trainer of the island’s wild animals, will be waiting for them with many exciting surprises; Linuos de Pádova, a talkative patriarch and something of a circus that keeps the family laughing continuously; his charming little wife, Santa Amelia de la Abundancia “provider of all the fruits”; Lucca the Centaur, descendant of Chiron and designer of healing jewels; Sherezade the Winter Heart, who keeps life under the ice in the winter season; little Serena, who dreams and harmonizes the beauty on the island and Ugo the chameleon and Benjamin, with the power to camouflage, mimic and condition himself wherever he is. A gallery of characters that play between reality and imagination, myth, fable, archetype and daimonic reality (with permission of Patrick Harpur). To develop this new story, José Luis Serzo continues his personal multidisciplinary method (because if painting is the predominant discipline, we also find drawing, photography, objects, video-sculpture, literature as a thread…), and a careful and elaborate staging. A positive, universal, open story, in favour of imagination as a primary source of knowledge and life, generating new future realities.

José Luis Serzo thus continues his commitment to improve society with art, reminding us of our imaginative and creative capacity as the driving force behind the construction of our most immediate reality.