Interview to Jose Casas (b.1995), lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
The present interview took place in the house-studio of Granada-born artist Jose Casas, protagonist of this conversation. He takes part throughout the whole talk, which carries a special tone that we have preferred to preserve—because this, and no other way, is how he expresses himself: he who paints cracks, writes slashes, and feels wounded by many things. In any case, it is a testimony. But a poetic testimony. Something that, unfortunately, is rare.
Here are the remains of what was spoken. Strokes of pictorial fragility, psychic archaeology, visual lyricism, and more.
The present interview took place in the house-studio of Granada-born artist Jose Casas, protagonist of this conversation. He takes part throughout the whole talk, which carries a special tone that we have preferred to preserve—because this, and no other way, is how he expresses himself: he who paints cracks, writes slashes, and feels wounded by many things. In any case, it is a testimony. But a poetic testimony. Something that, unfortunately, is rare.
Here are the remains of what was spoken. Strokes of pictorial fragility, psychic archaeology, visual lyricism, and more.
The first one is very generic: Did you always know you wanted to be an artist? How did it all begin? Since then, what has the process been like of finding your own voice and arriving at the abstract structures you make now?
No. Never. And now I’m condemned. [Laughs]
More than a beginning, it was recognizing something that was already there, though I didn’t realize it until much later. A kind of volatile perception that surfaced in childhood conditions. I would obsessively draw Pokémon, wanted to be a ninja, and with my sister I made consoles, cards, and other toys out of Tetra Paks. At recess, my friend Jaime and I invented a serialized story about a strange benevolent vampire. I didn’t know what art was. There were no books at home. At boarding school, as a child, when time seemed to stop a little at night, I stumbled with surprise upon a pile of books called an encyclopedia. My favorite entries: flora, fauna, and natural disasters. Later, I lived for a few years within a religious, heraldic, or knightly order… I gained access to a literary and theological culture about Saint John, Saint Teresa, stories, miracles, psalms, biblical passages… Joan of Arc was my secret crush.
I abandoned that kind of faith and belief, studied a science-focused high school program, and became deeply interested in cytology, chemistry… That whole invisible world, really. In adolescence, I suffered a slow, nearly fatal twist. That was when I enrolled in a higher-level photography program in my hometown, Guadix. I felt then that I was looking at things again. I surprised myself by thinking, when I looked up, “How long has it been since I’ve seen this blue?”
My teacher encouraged me to study Fine Arts. There I began, in parallel, to read, write, draw, and paint on my own. I started insisting over and over again on the same format, on the same image, erasing and beginning again, like Penelope. That’s how I began—with charcoal drawings of 60 x 40 cm. That was when I turned the image into germ, stain, and seed: I was interested in how charcoal emerged, expanding to create something onto which one projects oneself, and which then closes back in. Entering into a mode that could be infinite, able to stop at any moment. That discovery thrilled me.
🦋✨Ｌáϋ𝑟á✨🦋:
all the Needles Aflame / each ___this is how essential this is
you know perfectly un-, the music falls into the music
there is no one it’s from another place – they marry, procreate, vacation – they have schedules they are not frightened – by the darkn-
-----, rather you know that
------♡🥛🍪° •𝘈𝒍ﺂcﺂ𝓪•°🍪🥛♡: HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I don’t know
I don’t recognize
Dark. Silence.
I get the sense that your work is at the same time intellectual and very emotional or visceral. It has something “raw,” so to speak. How does a new piece begin for you? From pure intuition, from intellect, from emotion…?
Yes, intellect… A dangerous word. Intuition was the egg, and everything that branches out when it breaks. From within, I see it as blurry and ordinary. I remember something I read from Emily Dickinson, saying in a letter something like: “How do I know if I like a poem or not? Or if it’s good? I know if I feel it or not, if it affects me or not.” When it comes to painting—stretching a canvas, priming it a certain way, seeing what happens… It’s usually raw, yes, but at the same time also very delicate. There is a certain “intellectualism” or “culture,” but I don’t think that really corresponds to the work itself.
Fundamentally, each piece is a Thing that happens, but first it catabolizes, and then we metabolize it—if we still have enough sensitivity left. It’s like when you find an object that speaks to you, a tarot spread, or any kind of -mancy: what it really is, is—and that’s enough. As a world nourished by the continuum of reality, as an individual and as a means of configuring itself.
I don’t like the word “project,” life is often seen as a project… I believe in the unexpected, in mirrors like Pizarnik’s, and in life as a living, unimaginable necessity. I don’t know if I believe in projects, I suppose yes and no… I make different works in different frames that are born from an intertwining of ideas that spark my curiosity at different times of life.
⛓ Ã𝗹𝐢c𝐢ǟ⛓: Reading a passage
There is something vile, degrading, in this transposition of our sorrows onto the whole universe; there is something of sordid egotism in supposing that either the whole universe lies within us, or else that we are some kind of center and synthesis, or symbol of it. (…) to grant value or importance to our sensations only because they are ours, this vanity turned inward, which we so often call pride, just as we call our truth the truths of all species. (…) it is the conflict between the emotional need for belief and the intellectual impossibility of believing.
☁♦⪼ㄥɑü𝙧ɑ⪻♦☁ *blushes and laughs higher and higher until it turns into a beep*
You’ve mentioned several times the idea of fragility and its connection with cracks or fragments. Could you expand on how you understand that fragility and what role it plays in your work?
Yes. It has to do with the psychic dimension in my work. In truth, it began by accident: one day I primed a canvas badly, it tore, it kept falling apart… It wasn’t what it was supposed to be. But I continued, because the soul hadn’t broken, it was emerging as the shell cracked. I don’t know why. And from there I began to discover things. Over time—over a lot of time—that became established until it stopped breaking… It grew in that way and not another.
To see these cracks is to see our own cracks too. And these, not innocently, lead you to a mental place. To what place? Fragility, yes, but also Strength, Tenderness. A side effect. Because when something shows itself as broken, it reveals a way of holding itself. Entity. There are images that only arise from there.
I like to keep company with those materials and their soul, which is ours too. I feel a strong relationship with them. To give them a place where, from the priming on, they were rigid. When they broke, they became flexible. They adapted, creating new articulations.
Then I roll them up, take them with me, and share them with others if I’m lucky.
☔ﾟǺ𝗹𝒾c𝒾a☔☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ: Whoever has it, has it. But we love more those who don't. We are at the bottom. It hurts hurts hurts hurts you have managed to make failure arrogant. Heralds of failure fear so much what they say…
~🎀♡ Lꮮ@üṛα ♡🎀~: Χείρων Unicode U+26B7 (⚷) Don’t get so romantic. Would you call it the ingestion of the padlock? Death? Recognizable? In its steps, the Hospital? The Greeting to the drain? Your best friend who turned into a Vampire? and who ripped out his ribs… Do you believe in turris eburnea?
Many of your drawings have a childlike air, as if imitating a child’s line. Why are you drawn to that kind of gesture or aesthetic?
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm… I don’t keep anything from my childhood, hardly any memories… a few photos that others took, with heads cut out, there are always cut-out heads, scratched-out eyes. A family album, almost an oxymoron. Perhaps it is loss that drives me. To imitate through, until becoming, even if just for an… instant.
Trying not to generalize or idealize childhood, I’ve been interested in children’s art for a very long time: its patterns, formal schemes, the intimate subjective genuineness, still a certain surprise or magic in the strokes, sometimes a gestural catharsis without too much weight. Trying to describe a child’s drawing coldly and objectively probably makes the language poetic. The darkness found in my work is part of this childlike notion. It’s comforting, warm… a darkness that invites touch, instead of pushing you away. It overwhelms like childhood. For those who despise shadow I’ll say there are, nevertheless, very piercing brightnesses. Twilight and childhood here shake hands, they allow a kindness to open the eyelids, I wouldn’t know how to explain it. I think childhood still forms an essential part of our ultimate core… and it situates itself in that darkness into which light is cast.
This appearance of childhood pours out several symptoms about violence and about one’s own tenderness. A childhood understood from its own stabbing as it grows up, a Latent love that the wind sometimes manages to stir. The childlike folding in on itself, curled up, sheltered, subterranean. It’s curious to think how the childlike surrounds us: sometimes we feed on nostalgia in front of a cruel world that doesn’t call things by their name, and we still hold on to something of when we named things for the first time. These impossible longings to be more than sensation…
🐝🌼Àأⅈcⅈศ🌼🐝: I seee I seee
𓆩💜𓆪Ⅼⲁᶸṛᵅ𓆩💜𓆪: .............................................what do you see
✨💕💖Δ𝒍ịcị𝘢💖💕✨: a little thing
🌴💛.ᶫ𝒶ᶸɹą.💛🌴: ............................ what is it?
𖥻៹Ḁ𝑙¡c¡𝖆🌻✨: it starts with the letters HBKJRCS!
🌺💚⭐_Ļ𝗮ꪊɹ𝗮_🌺💚⭐: ................heroin, beating, kidnapping, jail, rape, conception, suicide
🌊 .·:¨𝙰ľ𝐢cꜞ𝒂¨:·. 🌊: Yes !!!!!!!
L: .....................................................................................................................
I remember a text of yours in which you speak of works as ‘psychic excavations,’ if I’m not mistaken. That leaves me with a question that may not have a definite answer, but which intrigues me: What have you been finding in that excavation process?
Yes, there’s almost never an answer. But we’re left with many truths with a “b,” poorly described. “Psychic excavation” is one of those terms I sometimes use like that, uncertain, yet somehow brave. I mean… “Excavation” is a somewhat dangerous word. To dig, to scratch, to search. I mean adding matter, removing matter, adding again, removing again. How an image forms as another deforms. Layers overlapping until encounters happen. Suddenly realizing that they have appeared, that forms of re-reading have emerged.
I mean “psychic excavation” as the processual sense of working with that mental-material plane, physis-psyche in its univocal consciousness, a kind of mechanism that is only guided through the sensitive crossings that each gesture produces, finally consolidating as a trace on the surface. All of that, in some way, also crosses with lived experience, with the autobiographical. It’s charged with a kind of static electricity, that every now and then jumps like a spark. That’s why I call it “psychic”: it’s an unconscious shedding produced by the concrete action of digging. It’s a process of confronting thoughts, of relating to the world, to leave behind a material witness. Images that translate feelings that can’t fully be defined, that suffer the loss of their original lucidity. Each time you try to translate them, they dim. But the repeated act of trying doesn’t make it empty—far from it.
For example, the fragment as a feature of a kind of psychic-matter I attend to: a part of something. I think memory and recollection processes work like this too—reappearing in parts, partially blurred. They aren’t exactly as they were; they contain a constantly metamorphic present state. Permanence of change. The images I make have had to change a lot and at the same time retain what first drew me to them—it would be a shame to lose that. They contain areas that didn’t change at all throughout their making, and areas that were heavily reworked, whose changes mark the limit of their own wearing out…
I have cried many times while painting. For many reasons. Sometimes simply for the act of painting itself, because it is a Feeling, because it overwhelms me, or because I’m having such a good time. Those kinds of situations happen sometimes. Even when part of a larger piece, the fragment always suggests that there’s something beyond: that something would continue. Perhaps it is, remotely, an access to another world not painted.
★⁂⁙𐌋ᴧบŕᴧ⁙⁂★: we are working with mare magnum effort to postpone suicide. all on canvas, ash, various found materials, violent breaths, monsters that return, you still recognize them — they have their name, small light, temporal distortion, time spindle, hallucinations, sunlight in Night≠Name there is a difference Night and Shadow, aquiferous oxidation in a room without plants, other people’s conversations slip in and suspended dust and blue hunger. 1995.2014.2025.
Many of your works recall doors, windows, or portals—symbols of passage, access, or boundaries. Do you aim to generate that sense of opening a way through, or rather of delimiting access to other places?
I really like “symbols of passage”—it seems to say they are elements that modify movement and pauses… vix motrix or danzare per fantasmata…
There is a tear in the format that once drew from broken windows, collapsed or bricked-up doors, silhouettes of hunger and monsters… I know it’s difficult to situate oneself at the psychological height that an image gives us in a simple rectangle. My formats are born of another kind of organicity; I take great care that the “entering into the scene” we have inherited from the formats we know does not dissipate—I try to let mine follow their own course and remain equally accessible. To walk toward a form in order to enter an image.
But yes, I do in some way think of what I make as doors or access points, which are in turn delimitations of other places. One would thus access different places depending on the imaginative subjectivity of the viewer. Sharing and later discussing these access points from each person is rewarding… It is material of life.
To enter, I do believe a certain slowness of gaze is very necessary. It is something demanding for the gaze. It demands a waiting, like learning to listen to the enormously shy.
“We find images already present within us” or “I got lost looking at it” or “I feel like going in but I don’t quite dare” or “It reminds me of some important thing I once felt” or “I see this or that” or “Have you drawn a dog here, by any chance?”
+｡:.ﾟヽ(*´∀)ﾉﾟʌ𝕝𝒾c𝒾𝘢ﾟ.:｡+⇜: They’re cute. Cute-ter, the black tracing of the night A Cut of Light
┈━═☆❣️டάü®RA❣️☆═━┈: The windows peek out suffers from acrophobia
the tracing is important
They also have something of the archaeological remnant, of the found object, as if they came from another era. In some text you’ve mentioned the idea of “atavistic time.” What draws you to that relationship with the ancient, the buried, or what seems to emerge from the past?
I’d say that, while I am interested in archaeological images, I never thought of imitating them. But life has been bringing us closer together, along with an inconclusive and divergent present… And so, one day, the archaeological and my inner world consciously met, and since then a friendship has emerged.
I’m very interested precisely in the meeting point that ancient images contain. I’ll call them “common,” not to say universal, in that they give me the sense of being part of something—nothing other than continuing to exist and respond to the same inexhaustible elemental things. In this friendship there are certain parallels, of course… the wearing down, the fracture… they resonate emotionally in their shared condition of different times seen in a present, both present through survival.
Probably the found objects were among the first manifestations of what we can call today “art.” In my work there are encounters in the making that become objects. A kind of continuum with opposing directions. I suppose in both cases what one perceives is what might be called symbolic recognition. Following this thread, the atavistic, the ancestral, is something that already was and will be. It is perhaps the need to situate oneself familiarly in the world through something Unknown, or what there is yet to know. It’s a fleeting but valuable sense of belonging, for those of us who feel uprooted. It’s not about territories or ideologies, it’s—I don’t know—a vital recognition, both distant and close.
AliciaEgomaniaღ༻꧂: I only know noises of someone going up a staircase
the one returning from nature Puushes away my •°•°☁𐑖àura☁°•°•: you are mistaken it says, the woman was illiterate*
goes up a staircase from which a trail of blood descends
Many references to animals or beasts appear in them. What leads you to explore that imagery?
I don’t know
*in unison*: ✿Aliciⅈǻ✰✧ sings for all the Alices from the album Blue Queen.
♡Xx~(ʟ𝗮𝘂𝗿𝗮)~xX♡ hums Theme of Laurafrom Silent Hill 2. The atmosphere gets a little foggy.
This gives us a bit of fear, but then it’s very chill and there’s enough sun.
I feel there is something very poetic in your work. How does what you write relate to the graphic or visual part of your practice?
It’s a sensation. I mean, for me it’s all a little bit the same, only with different ways of manifesting itself. What I like about poetry—or rather writing, or a certain kind of writing—is that you don’t quite know where it will take you, nor where it’s heading, but at the same time it’s very precise. It’s as if this whole set of things, of manifestations, can somehow contradict itself or contain an inner energy within.
That’s what interests me: that there is imprecision, but precision at the same time. That which wants to be said, has been said in this way, with these words, not others; these stains, not others; these abrasions, not others. Exactly that is what is communicated—something that snakes between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, the incomprehensible that is material of Life.
Often the poetic—or everything having to do with a system of understanding rooted in less translatable or more intuitive feelings—is dismissed as pejoratively confusing. I think the opposite: that it can be very precise, when we approach the obvious from an unknown place. This too can be a form of unlearning.
When I was at the Artistic Residency in La Puebla de Cazalla and saw those artists from Ojo Pértico drawing in charcoal with me, I realized this: that all I really needed was to unlearn many things. I don’t know.
LAU💜: Un learning, is useless anyway. But whatever.
•Lici~♧•: a baby like broken glass in the air saying:
boo.
Do you conceive of your works as self-portraits, as ways of channeling pain? Or do you prefer to maintain some distance from the subjects you address?
I gain more distance over time… but moving away is inevitably a kind of approach to other things. To distinguish the glass of the window from the wall of the world. I don’t mind approaching through self-portrait or the channeling of pain, but I am aware of the loss of perspective and of saying nothing beyond something selfish. Though this selfish notion at its core is what makes us exist. And in some way it is the seed of that external personal channeling. Pain is a necessary ingredient for mental balance; I’d even say it is part of what I have been able to call happiness. I try to care for it, because it will always be there.
🌊 .·:¨𝙰ľ𝐢cꜞ𝒂¨:·. 🌊: ........A............ the................. “people”....... lose it when they reject pain. I’ve never seen people more toxic than the thorns of euphoria. I am fun, but I cut the thorns of euphoria, yet sometimes I let them grow long, but then I become toxic, but no
♕♡⚘Ｌ𝖆𐌵𝗋 ura♕: That last sentence is from a song by Rojuu.
Can you tell us about specific references you draw on?
Laura: -no.
Alicia:-no.
Above all, images from the ancient world. Also very everyday images, like the window in this studio.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what the mummy might have been, its balm. What it is to enclose, what it is to preserve. Those kinds of gestures of making perhaps linked to a consciousness of death or of life more firmly grasped. It seems that the objects emerging around codified farewell rites are more durable. Death, farewell, decay, and retention. Material, immaterial. Though for me everything is matter.
I’m very drawn to many medieval images. Emblems that sit between image and word, like those of Horapollo and Alciato. What interests me here is the term “hieroglyph”—a sign, a writing, an image—that is none of those things exactly. Architectural elements: friezes, columns, stairways, everything that has to do with an image in a space, in some form. Flashes, caves, clearings—of course!—timeless images that strike you across the face.
I always turn back to the same, really, to those who move me. James Castle, Judith Scott, Henry Darger, or Jeanne Tripier—I find them inexhaustible.
Rather than placing myself within a concrete field of study, I draw from small wells my attention happens to dig into various themes. Nor is it about one specific era—references sometimes run dry for me; things coexist and form new bonds. I don’t usually think much about references or almost anything when I’m working. I’m not very studious in that sense. I just let them slip in, if anything. It is more a process of absorption.
Could you tell us more about the process of creating your pieces on a material level?
As an essential answer I’d say I don’t really know what happens, though I do know what I do. More or less, it goes like this:
First, there are the base materials, let’s say canvas, onto which I apply a thick priming layer. Depending on the piece, this varies, but it’s usually a mixture of glues—mostly white wood glue—combined with fillers such as matte plaster, “blanco España” chalk, gypsum, calcium carbonate, perlite, marble dust...
Once everything has dried and hardened, the format begins to emerge from manual actions and the work itself. The fragment takes shape through folding, fracturing, braiding, tearing, flattening, hollowing, extracting, reducing, cutting... After this whole dance I paint the piece—usually stapled to the wall—using pigments, charcoal, oil, waxes, varnishes, oils... I make a lot of use of steel wool, sandpaper, and brushes. Once I even used a grinder, delicately, to carve lines. In short: sanding more than painting.
This process oscillates—it’s an intermittent adding and subtracting, where creation and destruction paradoxically become one and the same act. It continues in sessions of no specific length, often quite extended, in which earlier phases may repeat in a spiral manner. But there are no prejudices about time, nor too many rules. Some pieces have taken me close to a year, others just a couple of sessions. And both manage to have that something. Having that something is what matters—it can appear suddenly, take forever, or not appear at all...
What remains, finally, is the observable that leads us to the invisible: traces, marks, scratches I call “negative brushstrokes”... and finally battens or structures that allow for their concrete form of display.
★彡[𝐿𝒶𝓊𝓇͢͢͢𝒶]彡★: ..................Art Attack
➳🦈•Ā𝑙𝚒c𝚒ⱥ•🦈°᭄☆: jijiiji A
Half past 3
A Single Bird
To the silent sky proposed a single term of cautious melody
What you do has a very physical presence in space, occupying floors and walls, expanding beyond rigid categories of sculpture-painting-installation. How do you conceive the relationship with the place where the works are installed? Are you interested in establishing a dialogue with the environment?
Seeking a Place. The Place is created through conditions—spatial limits and the characteristics of what inhabits them. Space becomes place, sometimes Place, through inhabiting, through occupying. The pieces, in their material potentialities—contained and unfolded—speak one language or another, in one tone or another, depending on how they appear or hide within the “landscapes” they form together.
In my case, since I almost live alongside the works, I try to remain permeable in my attention (an attention that is neither passive nor active, neither worried nor unworried—just the faint brush of playfulness in a subtle gesture) toward encounter and accident. In the studio what happens answers to a secret but transparent solitude.
To arrive and see a work alongside a stain that has been there for years; to make a structure that resembles that stain. To consider a diptych because the piece you’re working on happened to fit with the coat you left on a chair that morning. Maybe there’s something triggered by an object that keeps appearing in your mind. Everything feeds on itself. The synchronic is a growing response to everyday making, which we can keep nourishing. The rest is intuitive movement and childlike surprise: move, shift, compose, remove, play play play play until you hear a “click.”
There is a certain care for the elements, as though they were part of a chemical equation where the pieces react to each other. The chosen space-tensional arrangements between works are capable of giving presence, depending on their spatial composition.
Adapting to exhibition—whether in a white cube or in a space charged with another significance—means building something already contextualized, reactive to the nature of the work and everything happening during installation. Until the day of the opening, I don’t rest from the installation—it’s crucial. Almost always I end up sick; the body’s defenses say ciao. Sometimes I dream of shapes and rooms when the opening is near—it’s the flower of worry blooming. Every change generates a different entity. I tell myself I must perceive the sensation of the room’s speech without language. My tone is concrete—it points toward a specific state of mental intimacy, and at the same time toward an openness of meaning where the unexpected may arise, where the “I” is “you,” where the “I” is crossed by something I can’t describe, that reduces or amplifies the invisible voices of something I don’t quite know, but which speaks without grammar through what is shown. I’m not especially interested in being a “creator”—each exhibition I must see as somewhat alien to myself. Yet intimate, all the same.
Another thing I consider is how the whole of the room, the individual works, and the approach to them are perceived as different worlds. The same piece feels sensibly different according to these three perceptual scales that occur in the coming closer and moving away—walking, perceiving. The world of nearness tells one story, the distant another. Sometimes you don’t expect what you’ll see when you get close.
Lastly, I have a tendency toward detail and secrets. To offer a slower exhaustion of what is seen, precisely through what is hidden: minimal formats in shadow, something perhaps on the ceiling, or responding secretly to a main piece, like a shouted echo returning as a whisper.
𝓛𝓪𝓾𝓻𝓪 🧸ྀི: ¿what if instead of having a physical presence it had a non-physical presence?
ִֶָ𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🐇་༘࿐𝒜𝓁𝒾𝒸𝒾𝒶 : broken loaf of bread metaphor of life
The first time I saw your pieces, I felt both incomprehension and great curiosity. When creating, do you have the public in mind, or is it a personal process apart from the exhibition space?
❝✧Ꮭɑϋ𝔯𝗮💘❀: Like in a bestiary, the lion was described and then assumed to be a dog, or conversely the naval as a unicorn, or us (aLICIA LAUGHS)**Ñ*^_^* comprehension stalagmite
incomprehension stalactite to the embrace of the Hedgehogs and their unintended Encounter they f it en chant if when approaching……………...bite………………… relieves………us………………….. (aLICIA: YES YES YEEES)** Ñ*^_^*
threads
tremble
Are people’s reactions usually what you expected?
I never quite know what to expect. What interests me most is what you just mentioned—that sense of not quite knowing what you’re looking at at first. I like that, because it takes you down from your pedestal. When someone thinks they know something too well, they begin to prejudge. I prefer the feeling of seeing something foreign, still to be discovered. I’m much more interested in learning. That doesn’t mean not being critical, of course. I think I am quite critical. But I prefer the translucent—to not fully understand what it is or how it’s made, to feel drawn to get closer. All of that is material too, in a way.
When that happens to me—or when I see it happening to others—I find it valuable. I feel. I’m interested in there being a concrete atmosphere, one that can be felt, reread, that can accompany.
𝕷𝖆𝖚𝖗𝖆: The illusion died in front of that. The People, which is all of us and also you, know that they usually look as if in a shop they don’t want to enter, drink wine and beer, and don’t look again. In other worlds, for example, yes: listening to music, yes: reading, yes: playing with keyboard and mouse, but usually one doesn’t look at a piece. Maybe someone who goes alone and wants to see. Loves. Only because they want to see the exhibition and finds themselves alone. And Flash! Or someone who has it in their Home and goes to the bathroom at midnight and sees it there. Stopped.
Recently you’ve had more visibility, with solo exhibitions like the one at the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia, or at El Chico gallery. How do you maintain spontaneity, love for play, intimacy in your practice when it begins to become a profession?
I feel grateful, it’s important to feel so. This year and the last I’ve been able to realize various Expressions alongside many other people, and we know that without them, nothing would be possible. From maintenance staff to directors. The problem shouldn’t be the fact of becoming a profession.
Sometimes I notice, subjectively, that professionalization can wilt the specialness of creation. And yes, it can be like that. But other things can wilt it too—it depends very much on who you are, or how you are. On one hand, the timeframes and demands of dedicating oneself entirely to the art industry, let’s call it that, carry intrinsic dangers for artists: creative apathy from overproduction in constant repetition, a certain lack of reciprocity from institutions, and conditions that make it hard to sustain oneself until the next project.
You’re forced to choose and bet your life, to leap into the void without knowing how you’ll continue, or how projects will sustain themselves. Our work requires a great deal of demand—personal, social, economic... constant research within and outside the projects, endless filters and selections... It’s painful to think that most of the circumstances we live through, along with these characteristics of the job, make continuing impossible. I’ve worked many other jobs, too, in order to keep going—jobs without joy, temporary jobs I knew I’d have to leave if I got into a residency or a call... And yet, mentioning this in this “world” sometimes takes away prestige or value. But I ask myself—what kind of prestige, what kind of value?
We rely on precarity and on Lack, because there’s no other choice. And many times these become indispensable ingredients for creation. But I could never justify them. This Lack is an intense, long-lasting pain with which you’re forced to learn to live. There’s also a game of congratulations I don’t entirely understand. Maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to dance in those aspects—I don’t want to dance. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, truly, but from this side there’s something terrible. It’s part of our choice—I probably should have chosen a job that could support my family and me. And well, to this day, I don’t know exactly how I’ve managed to do something, but I have. A little something that, if it has stirred or moved someone, for me, that is more than enough.
In my case, continuing to have creative opportunities means being able to keep going deeper, gathering conditions to work a bit better...
Maybe the professionalized artist dedicated to the industry ends up withering; maybe the young artist chasing a “dream” loses the will to continue under the too-heavy effort of survival. What I think matters, one way or another, is to keep alive that Love for making, the one that arises from the inner world that grew without pretensions.
𑁍┊Ǻใⲓcⲓ@: Her stomach growls, the power and water have been cut off, and it’s starting to smell bad…….……..
(however, Laura Shines and smells good)
Laura: I shower in the Fountains… Her stomach meows
Finally, I’d like to know: where do you think your work is heading? Do you have any dreams for the future?
A midsummer night’s dream... I’d like to keep discovering many other kinds of materials, found objects, and to be able to embed them—throw myself fully into the synergistic relations of strange materials without losing the essence of what’s already there.
To collaborate with other people—make, I don’t know, puppets for a play, or sets onto which visuals could be projected for a concert... those kinds of collaborations, too. In my own work, to move further into more object-based bodies, pieces that could stand on their own at the center of a room... I imagine using different powders, beads, crystallizations, resins, waxes... Something that emits more of its own pulse. To be more precise in my work. I’m exploring more displacement, combining verbs as materials: braid, tear, weave, care, destroy, veil...
And as always, to keep drawing—something so essential, so precious in its shadow.
❤️🧸 ◥L A U R A☠︎◤𝓛𝓪𝓾𝓾 ❤️🧸❤️🧸 𝓛𝓪𝓾𝓾 ❤️🧸: …thank you
🐿️°♡✧*✧♡°ÅŁÏÇÏÅ🐿️🤍°♡✧*ᗑ✧♡°: bye beauties 🤍
Interview by Whataboutvic. 15.09.2025
RATO AO SOL is a Luso-Spanish platform for the emerging arts, founded by curators Francisca Portugal and Whataboutvic.
rato@ratoaosol.com
