I have always worked with feminine symbols, although in the beginning I did so subconsciously. I have always used the symbols of the nutrition of life, fertility, maternal spirituality and the feminine universe. This can be seen in my exhibitions such as “The Circle and the Dot, The Dot and The Circle”, “Stringing Pearls”, “The House of Time”, “Birth of Venus”, and in many other works that I have developed.
When I went to live in the Pyrenees, at first there was no room for a studio, because I lived in a hotel. At that time I had an exhibition in Paris and needed to paint big canvases, so I began to take them into the open fields. One day I noticed that a leaf had fallen on one of the paintings and tinted the paint. I liked that.
At that time I had bought a canvas measuring ten meters, and that is when the idea of the “Four Seasons” arose, a canvas that I took out into the woods and developed and elaborated and painted according to the seasons, always covering it with earth, tree branches and stones. At the same time I wanted to expand this project by leaving some paintings in dry river-beds later to be covered by water, others around tree trunks, and so on.
Being a pilgrim by nature – in fact I traveled the Road to Santiago in 1990 – I felt that my work had to break out of the four walls of the studio. I formed a partnership with nature, and my work began to reflect its fingerprints. I believe that this is a powerful partnership. Whenever I retrieve my work, no matter where – in the Amazon, in the Pyrenees or on the Road to Santiago – I am always moved by what the invisible hand of nature has done to my original paintings.
I think that this is incomparably unique art, for in each and every case the will of water and wind and the mystery of stone and earth interact with my work in a very special way.
I often take the painting ready to be placed under the ground, at other times I use materials from the place itself, as with the spring flowers on the Road to Santiago, and the wind and sea at Sète. I do my part of the work and then it returns to the earth, undergoes a period of telluric gestation and is then retrieved.
To work with the Earth is to work with the sacred, the Great Mother, the Immaculate Conception.
It is like a seed about to be transformed. The final product of all this is very important to me. The Road to Santiago kept ten of my paintings, and the Amazon and the Pyrenees kept one each, but for me it is not just the visual aspect that matters, but rather all the energy surrounding this transformation.
On the Road I began to work with metals. I want to use more and more resistant materials. This is just a beginning; we have to wait to be shown the fruits that time will yield.
I worked with copper, not by chance, because centuries ago the alchemists used the symbol ♀ – which also represents the planet Venus, the Greek Goddess Aphrodite and the feminine gender – to represent this metal.
13 May 2008
Burying in the ground
Digging up
17 May 2008
I dug up the Heart and other paintings left at Cebreiro.