osvaldo puente

Huge stones fell placidly to the water surface. They soundless sank and disappeared. Everything happened in a silence that expanded in three dimensions… until everything was encompassed. The landscape then revealed a diaphanous and essential sordidness. 

I took a deep breath, filled my lungs and entered the realm of the ambiguous.

Some called it birth. For me, it was the beginning of a process that I continue to practice daily in this presentation, some examples of this journey.

Perhaps the most intimate part of my creative production. Like a travel diary, these notebooks reflect the daily evolution of the processes of my work. Often fragments of texts (my own or others) that are particularly relevant at the time. Sometimes sketches for projects (many of which were never realised). A kind of graphic and textual journey, a dialogue with the paper that leaves a record of the gestation processes.

In this language we try to evoke what is intuited behind the apparent. The format is digital and there is usually an editing process that brings the image to a point where the apparent and the intuitive merge. The added text serves as an element to question the linearity of logical thought. An unforeseen and unexpected reading is added that completes the image.

These larger works, in which three-dimensionality appears, are carried out for specific sites. They involve working with the content of a particular site (its history, its significance, its spatial and sensory characteristics) in order to re-signify its content. In many of these works, the temporal dimension also appears through the use of sounds that I create for the work. The perception of the work implies the spatial and temporal participation of the spectator; it is no longer a contemplative vision, but one must ‘walk through’ the work to become imbued with its atmosphere and content.

Works that use three-dimensionality but are perceived in a static and contemplative way. The supports can be canvas with the application of different types of objects and materials (earth, acrylic, solvents, objects, etc.). The final result is intended to have the character of an object that induces contemplation, silence and inner meditation. Sometimes texts also appear as significant elements, offering new readings or introducing a specific cultural or historical sphere for interpretation.

Initiated during the particular period when people decided to lock themselves in their homes, this format was channelled through virtual media (which at that time allowed for relative human interaction). Limited in duration (20 to 30 seconds), their intention is to “evoke” and recover the language of sensation and intuition. The images are no longer illustrations of an idea, there are no linear narratives, but rather revelations of primordial sensations forgotten or discredited by mental discourse. A breath of fresh air.

In some alternating periods I resort to this kind of two-dimensional expression. While this process is going on (it can take a few months), I take a pencil every day, almost ritualistically, and empty my mind by letting my hand make strokes on the paper. In the course of this process, my gaze begins to detect the appearance of identifiable shapes (usually body parts, plants…) From then on, my hand outlines and defines more clearly what I have intuited. There is no intentionality or prior idea, it is not a process of re-presentation. The images emerge accidentally from a forgotten place in the mind and demand their manifestation.

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