Most of the works on show in the exhibition come from the Mundu gabeko paisaia (Worldless Landscape) series, made from pictures which once hung on the walls of private homes and were then thrown out. The subject matters depicted are generally rural landscapes. The choice of this topic was also motivated by my pre-existing interest in rural life, and by the direction these paintings marked. The vast majority of the pictures found in different places over the span of several months were of rural landscapes, and so, if we can take what has been cast off as a sign of popular taste, it would seem as if rural imagery accounts for a significant part of it.

The painter and country dwellers probably see different things when facing the same view. Where the painter perhaps sees a calm and silent landscape, the peasant’s gaze sees countless signs in little details that will require him to take one action or another. He is not captivated by these visions because his relationship with his surroundings is too close. In order to be able to recreate the countryside as an idyllic or exotic place, one needs a certain distance. Today, although farming land still exists, the type of agriculture usually associated with small farmers has largely been replaced by monoculture, a homogeneous large-scale agriculture based on industrial criteria that obeys predetermined conditions and no longer depends on the constant signs that once obliged farmers to adapt to changing circumstances.

Since more or less ten years ago, over half the world population lives in urban areas, and all forecasts predict that this percentage will keep rising. The future is always uncertain, but now it seems that we no longer imagine it as a better place than the present. Back in the 1950s Günther Anders argued that the more technological power grows, the smaller we become. Progress used to be synonymous with prosperity but now prosperity poses a threat. Our relationship with this threat appears to concern us but, on the other hand, it also fascinates us, as is clearly reflected in the number of future dystopias to be found in culture today; in film, series, and so on. Now utopias seemed to be projected backwards into the past.

This problematic is the backdrop, the background landscape, to my whole process of creating, which, in the day-to-day of the studio, is an ongoing conversation with the works which I compose by cutting and pasting bits and pieces of paintings. This entails an evident gesture of violence, as these were once unique and unrepeatable works. The end result still shows the visible marks of the cuts, stitches and folds, thus evincing the performative component of the process.

The exhibition is rounded off with sculptures from the Bird & Bone series, assemblages made from the conjunction of copies of a human femur and parts of a synthetized bird figure, and from Cold Ears, made using copies of an ear. Both play with confronting us with elements that we could imagine as belonging to ourselves, to our own body.