You are graduated in civil engineering. When and why did you start to be a visual artist?
I got graduated as civil engineer in 2002. By then i was already into urban art as I began painting graffiti an murals in 1995. As soon as i got my diploma in 2002 i went to India for an extraordinary 4 moth backpacker journey. When i got back to Spain i jumped into art to work in studio and public space. I worked hard into Boa Mistura collective between 2001 and 2015. We worked all around the world. But in 2015 with Mateo, my second son, on the way, I decided to get off the Boa Mistura rocket and focus on my personal work to see my children grow up closely.
So if I have to put a start date in my personal career as a single artist, I would say January 2015
Your research include photography, painting, urban art. Which themes do you study in these fields?
My way of working is by projects. Each project focuses on a topic and develops with a specific language. All of them are united by a line of discourse which speaks about the territory and the relations that man maintains with it.
Projects like “Stupid Borders”, which talks about boundaries, materialize in landscape actions filmed with drone and conceptual pieces on paper. It is a set of works that emphasizes the artificial and ephemeral nature of borders.
Others such as “La Traza Vacía” or “The Naked Trace”, speak of the anthropization of the landscape and are translated into impressions intervened with paint. For this project, territories were chosen at random, within the Iberian Peninsula, and after capturing an aerial view of each one and printing it, the areas under the influence of man were covered with black paint. The result is a series where at least 70% of the total surface is black. Which shows the little space that remains for wildlife in a world where the presence of man is expanding to all corners.
This way I could continue project by project. Each one focuses on an idea and is translated with the language that best fits that idea.
Do you study also social phenomena…
I think all my work is about social behaviour
Your painting works are a calm combination of colored background with the apparent casualty of cw towbly paintings. Who are your models?
Here you are talking about the project “The garden of Fukuoka”. Well, this project is a tribute to the Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. He is the forerunner of natural agriculture, a non-interventionist methodology, where agriculture develops by flowing together with the rest of the natural ecosystem that inhabits the earth’s surface. A philosophy based on “not doing”, that is, “not plowing, not using chemicals, not pruning, not removing weeds, etc …” and that is in tune with that “flow” so typical of Buddhism and Taoism.
I have translated these ideas, through painting, into two sets of works. The first series, the deserts, represent industrial agriculture. They are pieces where the same gesture is repeated on a thick layer of monochrome oil. They represent a piece of land where only a single species grows. Something that is far from any ecosystem and from natural balance.
In the second series, gardens or wild orchards, painting, gesture and color flow freely, in the same way that vegetation and nature flow. There is a complex and rich balance as in any natural ecosystem. To make these paintings I had to forget a lot what I had consciously learned about painting. Forget about the composition, the representation, or the previous sketches. Just flow. Obviously these paintings remind those who paint from the stomach, like Cy Twombly, but much more to those who have not yet been contaminated with the models of representation: children between 2 and 4 years old. I often envy their freshness and lack of fear when it comes to staining. I admire them. I think I’ll never get to paint as pure and wild as they do.
Is there a connection between painting and photography?
All the projects are linked by this axis of “territory and behavior”
In your works we can find defined geometry like in your works of photography or undefined borders like in paintings? How did you change from defined to undefined? Is there a precision in your undefined paintings?
When I want to talk about an specific idea or concept then I look for the best way to narrate it. This sometimes leads me to pure geometries drawn in the landscape, sometimes to a painting completely free of ties, sometimes to beat on a stained plaster plate, and so on.
As I said before, it is the idea that commands. The language is at the service of the idea.
In your works we could feel a tendency to classification, definition, delimitation: how do you define a limit?
But I do not believe in limits. I rather question them.
Any limit is not real. All of them are only constructions of the mind.
An example: boundaries between nations. They are not objective realities. They are only entities built in the collective imagination. They are ephemeral and artificial, not real.
How do you define your future?
The future is always wonderfully uncertain.
That keeps me alive and awake.
And what about your artistic future: how do you imagine it? Are you experimenting or studying other topics?
Every day I feel more attracted to projects with actions in the landscape.
There is a powerful reflection behind them and when they land as a “work of art” they do it in a very synthetic and attractive way.
I think they have great poetic potential.