Silencio Y Materia

From the exhibition *Silencio y Materia*, curated by Jorge Pietrowski

What inspires me when I paint?

I am often asked this question, and it makes me nervous because I do not recall ever experiencing that magical or supernatural manifestation while painting. Could it be that I am not one of the chosen few—those struck by a divine spark that drives them to act with the confidence of being inspired? Surely not; and I cannot deny that if I were touched by inspiration, the work—which at times becomes very arduous and heavy—would be considerably easier for me. Yet, I *have* experienced an inner force that drove me to face challenges born of my feverish imagination. One such instance occurred during a sleepless night in my apartment in Le Marais, Paris.

It was one in the morning when I got out of bed, went to my studio, and painted my first abstract works. Might this be an acceptable example of having been touched by inspiration? Perhaps… Another instance was when I discovered Degas’s phrase: “Painting a picture is like committing a murder; one must have all the alibis prepared.” Although I retained elements of my earlier painting style in that project, the dominant factor was the game-like strategy I employed—theoretically underpinned by ideas drawn from Baudrillard’s book *Seduction*. This approach resonated with my emotional state, harking back to the time I created *The Amphibious Ambiguity of Feeling*—a work that had a long and painful journey. It was a canvas twelve meters long by one meter ten centimeters wide, offering me the chance to fully immerse myself in the realm of feeling I had already begun to explore during my second stay in Paris.

There are other “inspired” moments I could recount here, but I wish to move closer to the present. *The Embedded Dagger* (*La daga clavada*) marked a feverish moment in my artistic journey—one with lasting effects that persist to this day, giving rise to thousands of drawings scattered throughout the studio. Mentioning the workshop brings to mind the moment of inspiration when I decided, in broad strokes, what the house-workshop in La Calera would be. It was in a split second that I resolved a delicate and complex architectural challenge.