Let’s start from the absolute and debatable premise that every activity of art implies a fermentation process that takes place somewhere. I like to think that the creative process, or the fermentation of Jorge Drexler (Montevideo, 1964), is born and guided by his mind. That is, the grapes from which the wine that makes up his musical work is made are the grapes that are born and grow in his brain. Brain as a cluster, even as a root. That is why I tend to think of Drexler as a complete writer, as a worker and thinker of language and poetry, even as a tree in the vast field of the Spanish linguistic tradition.

This fermentation process began in 1992, in Uruguay, with his album La luz que sabe robar. Already in that first appearance, Drexler’s narrative restlessness was evident and, above all, he was aware of the power of words to create the world: the miraculous evolution of his work is the decantation of that desire that the years have clothed. with maturity and, why not say, wisdom. Enrique Vila-Matas, who titled his latest novel Montevideo, believes that a writer is someone who thinks about writing. When does Drexler think about writing? In life, in the moment, while everything is happening: when together with Martínez (or Joaquín Sabin) they closed four bars one by one, but also years later, when she writes him a thank you, she gives him the definition of love along the way: “I love you much more than I tell you, I see much less of you than I would like.”

(…) I tend to think of Drexler as a complete writer, as a worker and thinker of language and poetry, even as a tree…

On Saturday, March 4, Drexler admitted to the public of Quito that it was bad for him to write during the pandemic. A cerebral artist, a troubadour who read classics and contemporaries, a body that reveals itself as fragile, was at that moment a writer in crisis. Few short-form cultural productions are so powerful, not to express a crisis, but to transform it and turn it into a creative force: Tinta y tiempo, as a song, is a confirmation that Drexler is reborn more than ever. A little older, and therefore more sensitive. And, like the greatest, he knows that every work is destined to die, because wine must be drunk, and therein lies his magic, in the act of instantly filling it with meaning: “What I leave written is not carved granite, I just lose it to the wind, a premonition.”

And like the greats, Drexler never knows why or when. “That voice, I don’t command it,” he said, hoarsely, because at the height of Quito – whose name he knows is soroche – he had to face it with his whole body. And the result was a chimera, a fusion, a love for art. He recognized that, with time and change, a contradiction was possible in the work: and just as he did not know where the body of his beloved partner ended and his began, he discovered that he was a whole orange, capable of sharing his solitude with someone else, which was good for him. She is known in the diaspora and raises her voice for the uprooted. He asked for asylum and was granted it. His work, the wine that fermented, is a painless and parallel refuge for thousands. And with time that has passed, that wine only gets better. (OR)