My initial works involved achieving small wood carvings that depicted animals or objects from everyday life, as well as images of saints and virgins. I created small assemblies oriented towards establishing a style and a theme.
This gave rise to a series of works where natural wood presence alluded to bones forming parts of magical beings, as seen in the 2008 series "Manada de Perros," where the material's inherent memory is essential for creating a certain degree of mystery.
These works involved knotting and assembling different pieces of wood, logs, and roots responding to bone anatomies. This allowed me to express how bodies intertwine and define themselves, creating unique appearances and characteristics. Pieces emerged where wood was incorporated as prosthetic or limb-like elements, recreating small magical beings, as observed in the series "Hombre a la Deriva" or "Balsa Muisca," where wood is combined with different materials such as iron and found everyday objects, along with the implementation of electric welds. Critics referred to them as "Presences."
In the "Ciudades Perdidas" series, wood appears as a modular resource multiplying and reproducing on the surface, recreating what could be called large conglomerates resembling huge metropolises, showing how space has been saturated, creating a continuous texture covering everything.
Similarly, in the "Ciudades Perdidas: El Regalo de los Dioses" series from 2023, wood appears as a fundamental construction element, providing corporeality to the works before undergoing a chroming process where color falls on the surface like a large black mantle, giving it a mystical sense. Here, wood, with all its semantic power, reveals sets or modulations with stairs, large corridors, ducts, and channels reminiscent of those lost spaces and civilizations bestowed by the gods and covered by the passage of time.
Wood has always been present in my work due to its aesthetic and formal qualities, as well as its structure and resistance. It embodies the essence of life itself, with its veins representing the passing of time and its power to narrate. In my work "Sinfonia Inconclusa" from 2009, wood is incorporated as essence and foundation, making its presence through three enormous circles symbolizing tones with metallic movements inside, suggesting sounds. I refer to theories related to form, movement, and color exposed by Kandinsky, Delaunay, and Mondrian.
Similarly, in the work "Cascada," wood is both body and structure to shape and heighten an 8-meter waterfall that falls uncontrollably onto the viewer, as a result of an event with no turning back. Here, the Cascade is a consequence of failures and opposing forces moving in opposite directions, relating to political and ideological forces within a society that unleash without finding viable solutions for conflicting parties, sometimes caused by administrative and state inconsistencies, other times by simple negligence. Societies struggle amidst irony and chaos.
In the "Villa Drummond" series, wood appears fossilized or in the form of coal. This refers to an uncontrolled state of natural resource exploitation worldwide. Both mineral and vegetable coal suggest a latent and emergent period due to excessive and unconscious practices of using nature in relation to survival on the planet. Its deep black color seems to warn us of the emergency unleashed at a time when economies and resources seem insufficient and unlimited in the face of uncontrolled and potentially growing demographic growth. The spectacle is presented through conglomerates resembling corals and large surfaces covered in coal, suggesting a comparison chamber where we can immerse ourselves in a scenario saturated with dark matter from which emanates an air revealing a desired digital image but far from reach.
Wood has always been an endless resource in my work, sometimes as support, other times as elements suggesting forms, sometimes as coal or simply as a petrified log. "Inter-Zona" is a huge structure reminiscent of an old mill, where wood withstands the passage of time to persist in its function and movement. Its propeller rests while another serves as support for a canvas that falls, suggesting a sacred cloak. A persistent dripping is heard, and a platform suggests taking action, inviting to touch the canvas and walk around it. The entire structure is an observation and an allegorical representation of the dynamics of groups or collectives that resist falling or stopping their activity.