Quince rechinidos menos (Fifteen Squeaks Less), Fernando Ortega's new project at kurimanzutto, continues the artist's recent research on sound. This series is composed of three dialoguing works that deal with the cracks and squeaks produced when walking on the gallery‘s wooden floor.

As Ortega contemplated the gallery space thinking about his project, he was constantly interrupted by the hardwood floor's squeaks —that's where he came up with the idea of removing the beams from the precise areas that produced the sound. Thus providing a physical interpretation for it: a permanent and visible trace for a –now absent– noise. The act of “canceling” the areas of noise created a new conscience of sound. The result of this intervention lends its name to the exhibition. 

In a similar equation, for Sin título (Untitled), Ortega cut out a phrase from the book Un homme qui dort, a novel by George Perec; In it, the protagonist talks obsessively about the squeaks created by the wooden beams of a floor. Different copies of the book were found throughout several public libraries in Mexico City. The cutouts are also presented in the gallery space, provoking a positive-negative dialogue with the floor intervention.

Finally, the third work of the exhibition, Afonías (aphonia): two newspaper clippings related to the loss of voice of famous singers, preserved and framed by the artist, are “inserted” into the gallery space instigating a new layer of “noise”.