Adiós a California (Goodbye to California)

With roots in concrete poetry, Herminio Molero founded the Cooperativa de Producción Artística y Artesana, CPAA (Artistic and Artisan Production Cooperative) in 1968, together with Ignacio Gómez de Liaño and Manolo Quejido. This was an experimental platform that linked him closely to the Madrid avant-garde. Meanwhile, he participated in happenings, independent theatre and action poetry, consolidating an interdisciplinary profile that would characterise all his work. In the mid-1970s, after his time at the Alea laboratories, Molero delved into electronic music, influenced by figures such as Brian Eno and the German group Kraftwerk. In 1979, he founded Radio Futura, an emblematic group in the Madrid La Movida, in which he was both ideologist and composer. His foray into music, advertising and cinema temporarily distanced him from painting, to which he returned in the late 1980s with a renewed aesthetic.

Adiós a California belongs to a series of four paintings inspired by his comic Las aventuras de California Sweetheart. This graphic narrative stars California, Molero’s transvestite alter ego, alongside recreations of real figures such as Guillermo Pérez Villalta and José Luis ‘Bola’ Barrionuevo. In one of her adventures, California embarks on a cruise where she meets Brian Eno. During a fainting spell, she has a vision of a ‘red-haired angel’ who reveals to her the existence of a volcanic island inhabited by a race of immortal hermaphrodites, of which she is a part. California sets sail alone for the island and returns transformed into Herminio Molero. For the artist, California Sweetheart was the verbalisation of an intimate experience: transvestism and the staging of multiple identities, turned into a form of political and cultural activism.

Raúl Martínez Arranz