SANTIAGO LENA

Statement

Much of my work is built with the elements that arise from the work process, fundamentally, with matter, which is not reduced to its pure state but can also manifest itself in abandoned or broken objects that were made with ceramics. These processes are not mechanical, on the contrary, they obey an emotional heuristic that orders and defines the investigations.

The concepts or ideas of my work are born in the matter itself, they embody it. The emotional, the perceptive and the intellectual come together and generate forms and also words. In those forms that appear almost unintentionally, I sometimes feel a nostalgia for my land, the sea and the steppe, those puddles that arm in the sandbanks and draw small worlds discovered when the tide goes out. An image or a dream, inspiration that opens me to creation. Each process of my work is a transit towards the definition of the work. In the kneading of the stoneware paste something organic is generated, typical of movement. Those folds that occur in action, I stop them, the fire petrifies them. The lathe is the main tool, for several years its language has worked with the rhythm of my body. The pottery pieces depend on these sensitive coordinates at the time of work and creation. The emptiness that generates each piece, that nothing necessary for something to exist, connected me with something that flows and moves, insistently. Some pieces that I am making are forms from which a mass of color comes out; It opens them, something exceeds them and exploits them, as if they were volcanic. Those powerful pieces speak of what cannot be stopped inside and appears. The persistent ancestral that cannot be repressed, because it always sprouts again.