PORTFOLIO
My work focuses on the exploration of images showing and explaining the functioning of alleged worlds existing beyond our immediate perception. Images coming from fields such as science, pseudoscience, esotericism and religion, which have deeply influenced our perception and understanding of reality.
I use different appropriation and intervention systems in order to check and transform these visual ‘evidences’ on a pictorial basis. In this process, painting dialogues with other art forms such as printmaking, photography, video, sculpture and installation. These interdisciplinary strategies and mixed media experimentation depend on the context of each image and the physical possibilities of the material in which it takes form.
I intuitively deconstruct these preexistent images in order to create new textures, colours and forms that suggest certain “proto-beings” and “proto-landscapes” which seem to emerge in the midst of a (de)formation process.
Altogether, my painting practice is a way to deal with this kind of imagery and seeks to somehow bring closer those inaccessible and invisible dimensions. This, by producing alternative visual experiences, generating further relationships with such visual platforms and revealing new potential structures contained in them.
Overall, my work links multiple elements coming from figuration and abstraction, sci-fi and mythology, faith and science, spiritual experiences and lab experimentation, rituality and virtuality, fiction and reality.
Selected Images
Open-Pit Extraction of Raw Materials
This series of works is based on printed images of the deep universe taken by the Hubble Telescope on which I develop some procedures to remove the ink and paper layers composing them. Creasing, folding, sanding, dissolving and burning are some of these attempts to go deeper within the surface.
The shape of each platform corresponds to the floor area of the room in which each image has been transformed or the gap inside the wood frames containing some of the pieces. Thus, these works gather different kinds of spaces, from the immeasurable infinite to the architectural and pictorial space.
This transformative process questions the finite deepness of something representing the idea of the infinite; the manipulation of a reality filtered by time, space, machines and humanity; the creation emerging from destruction and vice versa; the birth of diverse worlds and dimensions from the same elements; and the ongoing mutation of the world, metaphorically and physically embodied in these images.
Underlying Waters of Underdeveloped Landscapes
This project is developed by pouring water collected from different places around the world on black & white prints of Mars pictures taken by the Robot Curiosity. I have worked with water coming from rivers in Alaska, raining in Bogota, snow in Montreal, the Caribbean sea in the Mayan Riviera, and the Mediterranean sea in Marseille.
Water opens and breaks the CMYK inks by randomly reconfiguring them on the back of the paper, generating different kinds of patterns, structures and hues which depend on multiple factors such as paper features, climate conditions, drying timing, printer configuration, among many others.
The existence of water and the possibility of organic life under the surface of Mars, motivate this journey to explore our own planet while exploring the pictorial possibilities of these images of a very distant and barren place. The installation of the final pieces allows spectators to walk around in order to see both sides of these alternative water-colour landscapes.
Ceci n’est pas Allah
Video-installation made with collages of paintings’ pictures taken from art history books, placed on the shaded areas generated in the exhibition space by the incidence of some video projections lights on artificial white rocks.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Western history of painting, the prohibition of certain representations in Islam and negative theological thinking, meet together to inspire this sensorial experience and visual statement about the historical and conflictive image of God.
Clarividencias
This project consists of the development of stop-motion animations based on the overlapping, distortion, and alteration of materials, tools and images related to landscape and predictions of the future. Natural phenomena photographies, maps based on clairvoyants' forecasts, and NASA's meteorological models, are filtered and altered by crystal balls and quartz fragments. Thus, all these elements are mutually transformed and generate pictorial moving images full of colour, textures and abstract forms that suggest fictional (de)constructing “proto-landscapes”.
The installation is composed by a video projection showing a rotating crystal ball that filters photographs of ‘natural disasters’ while it is screened on the ceiling through a floating PVC balloon. There is also another video projection showing transparent quartz rocks that filter pictures of Earth's maps while is displayed on a monitor lying on the floor and surrounded by a pile of quartz sand.
CLARIVIDENCIAS is composed by the pieces Georáculo and Hard Waters on Flat Earths.
Falling Skins on Falling Skies
This is a series of photographs of plaster parts of angels figures on which some microscopic images are projected. The initial sculptures are thrown from high altitudes so that they brake apart into multiple fragments used to take these pictures. The projected medical images consist of histology staining images showing microscopic samples of diseased tissues.
In this way, after their metaphorical and physical fall, these celestial beings acquire a more terrestrial body by being represented in a heavy material such as plaster; being affected by gravity in a violent fall; and getting a new skin layer on which these immortal beings meet these ‘mortal dyes and stains’.
Grey Matter Dark Matter
This project is composed by drawings, altered printed images and video-animations related to eschatological issues. Religious representations meet medical and biological imagery, soul meets body incarnations, intangible beings meet image's physicality, and divinity meets the mundane. The installation is based on the arc structure of certain sacred spaces in which there is a central high altar surrounded by large size images distributed throughout the space.
Some of the pieces consist of charcoal drawings based on medical imaging techniques used to look inside the body (such as X-rays, computed tomographies, ultrasound scans, magnetic resonances, etc.), Christian representations of reincarnation, and pictures of alleged 'beings of light' caught on camera. The charcoal lines, traces and strokes are placed in the white-blank areas left on the paper by these printed images.
On the other hand, there is an installation of nursing tables with monitors screening stop-motion animations made with printed copies of Catholic representations of the body (such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus or a wing of St. Michael the Archangel), which are imitating the actual movements of the depicted organs.
Transgenic
This project consists of the intervention of printed pictures of some Michelangelo Buonarroti’s paintings located in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, through the modification of oil layers displayed on transparent Plexiglass sheets, which act as ‘editing screens’ based on some Photoshop edition tools.
I cover the whole Plexiglass' surfaces with paint and then I take out some parts of these oil layers in order to reveal different organic shapes suggested by the background figures. This action configures a kind of two-dimensional carving process inspired by the author's marble sculptural practice, his fascination with human anatomy, the alleged organic systems hidden in his works, and the relationship of these virtual and fictional internal morphologies with current and future genetic manipulation.
