Diego González Gómez
Pequeño recital para unas flores de verano
2025

 
Eleven pieces on piano for 129 purple flowers.

45min

Variable dimensións

Casa Museo López Portillo

November 2025


Small Recital for Summer Flowers brings together 129 purple flowers collected in Poland, Germany, Norway, and Spain between June and August 2025, arranged on white surfaces inside a grand piano. The flowers were gathered while I was thinking about someone I was in love with. To accompany them, I selected eleven piano pieces by composers from those same countries. The installation exists only for the duration of the musical performance.

Being in love implies a specific mode of attention. More than an emotional state, it is a reorganization of perception. The world begins to arrange itself according to what one is searching for, in the same way the eye gradually learns to detect purple flowers among the vegetation. Learning to see them takes time: to distinguish their nuances, to pause, to cut them, to preserve them. This process resembles the study of a piano piece—understanding it, repeating it, internalizing it until it can be performed. Both actions, collecting flowers and rehearsing music, make visible stretches of time that usually remain hidden, devoted to gestures that are almost never shown.

This recital explores how affects structure experience and alter perception. The persistence of the search, the discipline of care, and repetition form a practice that exceeds romantic impulse. The flowers inside the instrument do not function as ornament, but as the material trace of an insistent gaze: evidence that attention transforms the environment. It is a way of articulating what cannot be spoken otherwise.

•J. S. Bach - Allemande from French Suite  No. 4 BWV 815
•Robert Schumann - Kinderszenen Op. 15
I. Von fremden Ländern und Menschen
VII. Träumerei
XII. Kind im Einschlummern
•Frédéric Chopin - Etude Op. 10 No. 3
•Zdeněk Fibich - Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences Op 41. No. 139
•Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1
•Edvard Grieg - Lyric Pieces Op. 12 No. 1
•Federico Mompou - Impresiones íntimas: V. Pájaro triste.
•Shostakovich - Prelude and Fuge Op. 87 No. 4a
•Arvo Pärt - Für Alina