Fernando Valero Santa Cruz - Memoria del Diseño

Fernando
Valero Santa Cruz

Cehegín, 1958 – Málaga, 1984
Multidisciplinary designer

Born in Cehegín in 1958, Fernando Valero studied at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts of Murcia, where he carried out graphic, furniture and interior design projects. He worked passionately in these and other areas of design as soon as he graduated in 1979 and until his untimely death in 1984. Our colleague Francisco Martínez Almagro, who knew him very well, writes about this multifaceted Murcian designer.

To talk about Fernando now is to delve into MEMORY. Although it is a fundamental part of our daily lives and thanks to it we can develop our sense of identity, sometimes, over time, memory becomes lethargic and mute.

Human beings have the ability to store that long-term memory, where memories that have to do with people, words or events that were experienced in the past are saved to be retrieved at the time we need them.

Wanting to recover information that at some point has been lived, recorded and stored, does not make the memory arise directly or spontaneously. It is easier to remember when we verbalize this desire with other people involved, when we have a stimulus to do so and, above all, when there is an emotional involvement of all of them.

This process of making memory becomes collective, allowing us to contrast the recovered memories and differentiate the events that were real from those we imagine.

I have experienced intense emotion remembering Fernando, remembering common experiences and work to be able to write his portrait, 41 years after his death.

My thanks to José Ángel Valero, Antonia Fernanda López, Paqui Oñate and Magdalena Zamora for having allowed me to talk about Fernando again and continue to move us with his memories.

When dip, the association of design professionals, told me about the MDRM project, I thought it was a necessary idea, of great importance. At first I felt distant, perhaps because I was alive and active, and it was later, after a while, when I understood that, by generation, I belonged to the same group of selected until that moment.

Soon after, I was asked to incorporate my profile as one of the Protagonists, so I began to organize my CV and the documentation of my work.

I started with the idea of individuality and as I delved into my memory, colleagues began to appear, some of them already deceased, with whom I shared a career.

At that moment I realized the importance of collectivity and of not only vindicating people, but also the moments and creative processes that arose collectively. That happened for a few years in Murcia, between 1979 and 1984. Years of spontaneous, uninhibited, excessive creation… A way of life, without distinction between personal and work relationships.

“Looking back on those years, there is a name that has always been engraved in my memory, Fernando Valero Santa Cruz, a multidisciplinary creator… my friend, my companion.”

We met simultaneously between the Murcian night and the collaborative work that we developed in “Design. Interior Design Studio Shop”, a collaborative and creative meeting space that was inaugurated in 1979 by a woman precursor of modernity and design in Murcia, Agustina Ballesta Moreno.

About Fernando, the first thing that struck me, even before I knew his name, was his overwhelming personality, his brazenness and his cyclonic force. A force that led us to unite our lives and our creative vision.

We were kids, he was two years younger than me. We believed that the world was ours, we were immersed in a process of social change, a world of exultant creativity, fun, full of possibilities and opportunities. And there we were, participating and contributing.

Fernando began his pictorial facet at a very young age, exhibiting his work in galleries and exhibition halls in Murcia. He worked on many fronts of creation after finishing his studies at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts of Murcia in 1979, carrying out projects ranging from graphic design to interior design and furniture design.

He made numerous collaborations in “Diseño”, doing several interior design and furniture design works, and also graphic model making, such as the cut-out of the Romea Theater, edited and marketed by the Regional Publisher.

He worked as a freelancer in graphic design, in times of “cut and paste”, especially in event posters for bars and nightclubs, brand images for medium-sized companies and various leading businesses in the city of Murcia. Other facets were the organization of fashion catwalks and the creation of shop windows.

“One of those collaborative projects that meant a before and after in the form of analogue work was the creation of the photographic collage for the poster for the September festivities of Cehegín, made by Fernando Valero, Antonia Fernanda López and myself. A job I will always remember.”

At the end of 1983, Fernando underwent a profound change in his expressive form. He began to sketch and paint with an unconventional freedom, works that were cheeky, funny and full of irony, but also heartbreaking: they were the reflection of his inner volcano. That was the creative part of Fernando that interested me the most, with which I felt most identified.

He began with his collections of “pufferfish”, disturbing and with aggressive yellow and black stripes. It was followed by the “cats”, with scenes from Ancient Egypt where felines lurked between the river banks of lotus. But “the horses” are the definitive work of an interior Fernando. Horses that laugh, horses that bite, horses with blood in their mouths, with their hooves always in front, attackers, punk horses that kill their father…

Having assumed the painful emptiness and after the passage of four decades, on a visit to the family home in Burete, his brother José Ángel showed me the little legacy preserved.
Together we dust off, with manifest emotion, the work of Fernando, who, in just five years, developed an intense, fun and brilliant career as a designer

Thank you for so much!

………
Paco Martínez Almagro wrote for MDRM in April 2025

1979
Sketch for letter,
Murcia

1982
Children’s footwear tramin
Sketching for cards,
Murcia

1980
Car Dealership
Sketches for posters,
Murcia

1978
Orchard Festivals
Sketches for posters,
Murcia

1981
Quiwi Fashion
Sketches for clothing labels,
Murcia

1980
Cocktail bar
Sketches for posters,
Murcia

1981
III Lugo Film Week
Sketches for posters,
Lugo

1984
September Festivities
Poster design. Photographic collage by Antonia Fernanda López Guirao, Paco Martínez Almagro and Fernando Valero Santa Cruz ,
Cehegín

1984
Romance of the Advertising Poster
Antonia Fernanda López and Fernando Valero Santa Cruz
Faced with the irregularities on the part of the jury in the selection of the poster announcing the festivities, Fernando created the street performance “Romance of the Advertising Poster”, where this fact was denounced, making Antonia Fernanda the role of the blind narrator and Fernando the role of his mischievous guide.
Cehegín