The light of the Alhambra is a selection of paintings from the series Al Andalus to Egypt, which as a whole recalls and interweaves the vestiges of ancient civilizations with the present, following in the tracks laid by the first maritime routes which plowed the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The perfecting of the art of sailing allowed for the development of port cities and strategic locations linked by profitable commerce. Connecting the two doors of entry to the Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea", the Mediterranean) -- the straights of Gibraltar to the West and the Red Sea in the Eastern Levant -- ships coming from every known country exchanged and shared the products, science and technology which would change the world.

The multicultural result of the Mediterranean countries, an inevitability as obvious as the early miscegenation of its peoples, lead to the creation of guidelines for communication, forms of visual language in both written and spoken form, pictograms, letters and numbers which included international systems of measure and weight.

The barbarian invasions from the North and the dismembering of the Roman Empire in the middle of the first millennium did not destroy the commerce and the cultural connections between the Mediterranean peoples which, on the contrary, continued to integrate themselves via ever expanding land routes.

Beginning in the VIII century, a land called Alandalus at the Southern end of the Iberian peninsula with its capital city of Córdoba, later to become the Kingdom of Granada, was the last bastion of Mediterranean and multicultural Europe in the Middle Ages.

In my opinion, the progression of time and the formation of an official Western historic narrative, established in the Protestant North though the printing press and upheld in the South by ongoing Catholic intolerance, fundamentally separated into Jews, Muslims and Christians what was once an indissoluble Mediterranean culture. This narrative has acted as the very surgical instrument which has sectioned off our more recent history into these three unrelated and irreconcilable identities.

The world order of today tells us to hope for peace and prosperity for all people but does not acknowledge its own historic narrative which only highlights cultural hostilities, physical borders, and a world which in practice could not have permitted the complex development and levels of splendor which these Mediterranean societies actually achieved in past centuries.

In its totality, this exhibition tries to pay homage to the rich consequences of the art of sailing, of communication between peoples, of a time when men developed the self-awareness and humility of wisdom necessary for the absorption of new concepts and the development of the intellectual tools and technologies oriented to a common good -- the foundation of every nation but also of each human being.-

Guillermo Muñoz Vera - 2014