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Fosfenos, 2021
Installation
Etnoscòpic Festival
Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món
Barcelona, Spain
“So deeply rooted is our tendency to contemplate order as the sign of an organizing mind that we instinctively react with admiration whenever we perceive regularity in the natural world.”
E. H. Gombrich, 1979

The installation consists of a group of stones that reveal geometric patterns sculpted according to the viewer's point of view. Among the employed materials, marble gives clean and sharp shapes, alabaster breaks and ramifies easily, allowing a diffuse light to pass through, and travertine has fractal structures with shiny crusts dulled by dust.

The forms refer to the vision of phosphenes, slippery lights that we perceive with our eyes closed. It is an ancient practice of human beings that has a time of its own. The exuberance of geometric information, in constant movement and transformation, makes it hard to focus on just one image. This evanescence seeks to be captured and sublimated in stone, on the other side of the spectrum of materiality.

The sculpted tessellations are overlapping the textures of the rocks in their raw state, from the polygonal to the irregular and fractal. The intervened and the rough state are confused in the same object, evoking an intermediate state between formation and disintegration.

Fosfeno II, 2021. Alabaster. 16 x 33 x 25 cm

Fosfeno I, 2021. Carrara marble. 52 x 42 x 48 cm
Fosfeno III, 2021. Alabaster. 38 x 47 x 41 cm
Fosfeno IV, 2021. Travertine. 28 x 58 x 52 cm