Ready Mades

“You were asking where these readymades came from, the ones with books that were important to me during my studies (and in those of many Fine Art students). To be honest, they came about spontaneously, during the process, in dialogue with the paintings because they form part of the same idea. For me, they are self-portraits and they have appeared at the same time as I have made this clear change in both my personal and professional life – it’s something else which coalesces in the Looking for Goya series.

The kind of painting I was doing up until three years ago was lyrical abstraction, sensitive and emotional, influenced by everything that fascinated me. The periods of time I spent on my two most recent residencies – at ICCI Art Valley Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai in 2019, and the IV Symposium Art Diagonale in Wels, Austria, in 2021 – as well as the period during the pandemic, have led to my reframing my artistic practice because abstraction alone is no longer enough.

At this point, I identify more with the Fluxus view of art and life as inseparable. I feel that my work, my attitude to life and these ideas I’m developing, encompass much more than abstract painting alone, and I need to express this in different ways. The intellectual side of the painting that I do, that I’ve always done, is now more visible”.

Conversation with Álvaro de los Ángeles, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition “When the process becomes a painting…” CCCC.