Bar-Museo Las PedrizasFernando Sánchez Buenache (1960)

This artist, Fernando Sánchez Buenache, shares his name with the name of his village. While he lacks specific knowledge about his family’s ancestry, he assumes that it was his forefathers who rested and settled here, and gave this hamlet its name (or that, in an alternative scenario, took the name of the village for their own as well). The second of five children, Fernando attended the small village school until the age of fourteen and has not had further education. His other siblings who stayed in the village followed standard paths, but Fernando was always the “black sheep” of the family.

Perhaps this was related to his sense that everything in his world was interconnected. Fernando saw art in everything that surrounded him, and felt that little intervention was needed in order to more explicitly reveal to and share with others what he himself saw and appreciated. He considers himself an environmentalist and a naturalist, and is a dedicated student of local geography, geology, and biology. In 1987, he opened the Bar Las Pedrizas (pedrizas coming from the word piedra – stone – and indicating a place where stone is found); and began to bring in stones to decorate the walls. In addition to using them to adorn the interior spaces, he began to pile some of them up, creating animals, mushrooms, and fish. People responded to the little sculptures, and he set his sights higher, creating larger works that mimicked musical instruments, foodstuffs (including the iconic Spanish jamón serrano and plates of sausages), and more. By the early 1990s, he decided to dedicate himself to his art, and soon he had produced a sufficient number of works that they covered most of the interior of the Bar as well as the multilevel outdoor patio and terrace areas. All are placed with a humorous regard for where the different kinds of objects might be most naturally expected. So his stone-birds are mounted on the dead branches of trees or on the edge of the rooftop;  stone-tapas are lined up in the Bar’s display vitrine, stone-fish “float” in a glass “aquarium;” stone-flowers are “planted” in beds lining outdoor patio areas. Buenache intervened very little to assemble these works, rarely cutting the natural objects that he found, and using simple glues to stick them together if required.  He calls his artworks Zoolitos, little creatures or plant forms assembled from found rocks, minerals, and pieces of wood.

In addition to his installations in and around the Bar, there is a display of geological fossils (the Museo Paleo-Artístico), a huge space he is renovating for local ethnographic materials, and, most astonishing, a lower open-air property of some 3.5 hectares, to which he has moved some 1500 burnt tree trunks, scarred and killed after a huge wildfire in 2009. He intervenes very slightly with these monumental wooden forms as well, and has dubbed these works Troncosaurios (not directly translatable, this invented word is a cross between the word for tree trunks [troncos] and that for dinosaurs [dinosaurios]. Many do, in fact, seem to have a rather prehistoric feel, mimicking, perhaps, the real monumental creatures that once roamed these hills (Buenache de la Sierra is home to a renowned paleontological site). Some of these works are suggestively figurative; they may evoke running animals, many-legged lizards, slithering reptiles, or a wide range of other beasts, all seemingly quite at home in their new location and comfortable with each other.

The Bar Las Pedrizas is generally open or can be opened if someone is around; all of the exterior work on the building and the outdoor patios is viewable from the street if not. The Troncosaurio pieces are off a rural forest road on the outskirts of town; many of those, too, are viewable even if the gate to the property is closed.

~Jo Farb Hernández, 2016

Buenache de la Sierra, Castilla-La Mancha, 16192 es
Latitude/Longitude: 40.1181995 / -1.9783666

View Larger Map in New Window