SET Espai d’Art
Solo show Anomalías
Valencia, Spain
September 15th – November 11th 2017
This project started with a map of Valencia. I looked for itineraries with the most circular shape possible. I found six. I created a wooden sculpture from each itinerary. Subsequently, I walked each sculpture in the city on the very path it represents. Each walk varied from 1 to 6 km. I presented the sculptures as they were at the end of each walk.
SET Espai d’Art
Solo show Anomalías
Valencia, Spain
September 15th – November 11th 2017
Running away from the comfort and the security of the studio, I drew pictures while sitting inside the urban buses of the city of Valencia. I drew the same composition 12 times during 12 journeys on different bus lines. Every imperfection on the drawings are the result of the annoyance and discomfort produced by the movement of the trip. I not only had no absolute control over my drawings but I also had no control on where the bus was bringing me; at the end of each drawing, when I raised my head, most of the time I was totally lost.
SET Espai d’Art
Solo show Anomalías
Valencia, Spain
September 15th – November 11th 2017
I looked for rocks in the streets around the gallery. I found 14. For each one, I noted down the exact place where it was found. I brought the rocks to the studio and I painted them with 3 coats of 3 different colors. Then, I brought each one of them back to the place where I found it and from this point, I kicked it through the street until it entered by the gallery door.
Corrientes
Milestone Festival
Girona, Spain
September 2016
Project in collaboration with Nuria Mora.
15 kinetic sculptures installed in the Ter river. Current was used to generate movement.
Pictures by Miguel Water, Nuria Mora and Eltono.
Thanks a lot to Dani for his immeasurable help.
Le Dédale, art circuit in the public space
Belvès, Dordogne, France, 06/2016
When I was offered to participate in the Dédale in Belvès, I went strolling the street of the village to find ideas and ways to intervene in it. Used to work in cities, to create in the streets of such a charming and harmonious little village was for me a real challenge. Quickly, I noticed the presence of a lot of unoccupied houses with windows blocked with wooden planks. I had the idea to intervene directly on these planks and old shutters to highlight the buildings without denaturing them, without touching their stones. To paint on these ephemeral supports, marginal witnesses of an interrupted activity, provides them with a certain dignity and gives them back an honorable role in the city: support for a works of art.
Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object
Artmossphere Biennale
Moscow 09/2014
I have been doing research around the idea of “creating while walking” for a long time now (see the Promenades Project I did in Beijing: www.eltono.com/en/projects/promenades), my last idea was to register friction during a walk and I came up with the idea of RUFO – RUFO is a typical dog name in French and also the name of a toy dog that was released in the 80´s. I decided the four letters would stand for “Rudimentary Unidentified Frictional Object”.
Basically, I wanted to drag an artwork along a defined path and register the way it decays. I was doing tests around this idea when I was asked to participate in Artmossphere Biennial in Moscow so I decided to do the first RUFO experiment in the street of the Russian capital. I painted 11 wood boards with bold colored graphics and one by one dragged them around the city on different paths I had selected earlier (around the exhibition space, in random neighborhood, around the Red Square, around the hotel…). Each walk was between one and two kilometers, except for RUFO #9 where I walked for 2,5 kilometers and the painting almost disappeared entirely. Having the artwork interacting with the outside was crucial – showing artworks in the state they came out of the studio doesn’t interest me – my idea was to “print” the city onto each board turning them into witnesses of a walk, an experience. On the back of each board I showed the map of the walk and all the data generated (date, time, duration, distance and name of the streets wandered) – note that during the biennial, I showed reproductions of the back of the boards on spare boards for the people to understand better the story.
Pictures by Natalia Solovieva – Thanks to everybody at Artmosspere and to the people from Codered.
Ongoing project
November 2013 – today
The Promenades Project is about walking, observation and spontaneity. It’s about wandering in the city with no pressure, no time limit, no goal apart from walking and enjoying it. It’s about walking with total freedom of time and space to be able to do all that things that you always want to do but you don’t because you have no time. It’s about moving crosscurrent in the city with time for contemplation to be able to observe details that most people don’t notice.
Rule #1: Walk and, if possible, create something on the way.
Rule #2: Only use material found during the walk – the only material I allow myself to bring is for
documentation (notebook, phone, camera) and a bag.
Rule #3: Only execute ideas created during the walk – or a predecessor walk.
Rule #4: Enjoy the walk.
This journal is a straight chronological transcription of what happened during each walk.
On going project – Eggshell stickers and fadeproof marker
