This video is part of one of the series or lines or work that Crego has approached alternately in his artistic career. It belongs to the genre which he himself has called “walks”: leisurely wanderings in open spaces, contemplating landscapes, usually in rural, albeit not necessarily stereotypically bucolic, settings. Some of these videotaped walks are nothing more than private reports, very personal and voluntarily lacking in aesthetic ardour and pomposity. In more than one instance the artist has not even sought to screen them publicly. As the title suggests, in Verano: paseo y recuerdos, walks and memories overlap -literally at times, and by means of diverse effects at others: sequences, overprints, encrustings (“keys”)-, that is, the subjective report (with a hand-held camera) of a walk, and previously captured images of a summer vacation.
Crego’s interest in “walking” is a constant in his oeuvre. Many of the videos that fall into this line of work are simply designated by the specification of a place and a date (“Tolosa, october 1989”, “Cañicosa, april 1994”, “Barakaldo, april 1995”). Some of these have never even been screened publicly, in favour of other videos by the artist of less private a tone. The basic ideas of these “private” videos have nevertheless fed other projects of Crego’s, working processes and installations with or without video: Paseo caminando (I-II) (2002-2003) [Walking promenade (I-II)]; Paseo y recuerdos (2003) [Walks and memories]...
As in his other works, Verano: paseo y recuerdos has been produced with a certain aesthetic rehabilitation in mind, that is, a restoration of the seriousness that private audiovisual practices, by “amateurs” or dilettantes, have been denied. Crego’s walks implicitly vindicate the figure of the “sunday artist” with an affection for landscape.
At the end of the video the camera’s point of view rises above the horizon to show a clear and cloudy sky. In this vertical, upwards movement, we can appreciate a poetic tone that does not however abandon the everyday prose of the world.
