Analogue Archives

Static Continuum, 2024

Artist Statement

My mural, Static Continuum, captures the essence of Barcelona, my hometown. The sea is rendered in

11 shades of blue, while the hand-painted word Barcelona, created in five blue tones, symbolises the fluid and organic forms of Gaudí’s architecture.

This piece bridges ancient analogue techniques, such as Roman mosaics, with modern digital aesthetics. It emphasises the enduring relevance of hand-crafted art in a world increasingly dominated by AI and technology.

The sea, in its unending motion, represents life, rhythm, and the subconscious. It flows and recedes, embodying an eternal balance between stasis and transformation. In Static Continuum, I explore how the sky and sea merge, inspired by personal experiences that reflect Barcelona’s unique rhythm.

The fluidly hand-painted Barcelona evokes Gaudí’s adaptability and organic vision, uniting permanence with change, fluidity, and continuity. The mural invites viewers to experience the delicate balance between motion and stillness, transformation and constancy—all within the boundless blue of Barcelona’s sea and sky.

A Journey of Creation

Painting the word Barcelona square by square was a labour-intensive yet rewarding process. Working in my Bristol studio, I spent countless hours perfecting the technique, using just five colours to create the pixelated design. The most exciting moment came during the reveal, removing the tape to unveil the final piece—a magical transformation that embodies precision, patience, and passion.

This project has been a journey of exploration, pushing my boundaries and inspiring new directions. I am now expanding beyond letterpress artworks, with plans to scale my designs for interior and exterior walls, building façades, and canvases.

Acknowledgements

I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to Xavi Franquesa, founder of il·lacions gallery, for trusting me with this commission and offering me the opportunity to create Static Continuum. This project allowed me to merge my artistic vision with my love for Barcelona, and to share that passion on the world stage at Design Miami.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey—it’s been an honour to contribute to a project that celebrates the creative spirit of our city.

Description of the Mural

Title: Static Continuum
Medium: Hand-painted using acrylic emulsion paint
Dimensions: 350 x 732 cm
Unique piece: Made to order

Lines, 2020

Lines is a collection of monoprints that explores the relationship between positive and negative space using 24pt letterpress ornaments. Each modular squared ornament consists of five lines. When printed multiple times, the overlaps create mesmerizing moiré effects, giving the illusion of a third dimension.

This work represents a transition from analogue to digital, exploring the creation of 3D space in a graphic, 2D format. It was printed in London on glossy paper using a 1950s FAG proofing press.

Ephemera, 2024

Ephemera is a project dedicated to bringing attention to discarded metal objects, collected over 15 years from various locations. The metal wires, found in diverse places, are arranged on man-made cubes with bases made of concrete, aluminum-based cement fondu, and plaster –materials integral to our urban environment’s construction.

Each piece carries its unique history, embodying the discarded, the unused, and the unwanted. By bringing these objects together and placing them on display, their appeal is heightened. The act of illuminating them serves to embrace the non-existent and the non-visible.

All these artifacts, originally abandoned on the ground, have undergone transformations through the forces of gravity and nature. Shedding light on them provides new meanings and narratives, encouraging us to question and reflect on our tangible life experiences in the man-made realm.

In an age dominated by the digital and intangible, these sculptures serve as a poignant compensation, exposing materiality and creating a compelling collision with reality that holds relevance in today’s context.

Gravity, 2004 – 2007

Cities attract millions of people each year, seemingly growing with no discernible pattern or pre-established order. They encapsulate time and serve as living examples of the evolution they’ve undergone, presenting various layers of information that coexist simultaneously.

I view the city as a gravitational force that draws us in, forming a multicultural, multidimensional environment that fosters the creation of numerous relationships. It is a human-made landscape that simultaneously provides numerous opportunities. Cities grant us identity, and, in turn, each of us contributes to shaping that collective identity.

Myth of Sisyphus, 2005/06

Context:

Albert Camus was a French writer and philosopher. His most significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, resulting from our desire for clarity and meaning within a world that offers neither.

He explains his idea of the absurd in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The title of the book comes from a story in Greek mythology and uses the myth as a metaphor to discuss and question the idea of suicide and the value of life.

Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology described as one of the cleverest yet most devious men in history. Because of his cruel ways, he was condemned by the gods (the judges of the dead) to perpetually push and roll a huge rock up a mountain, only to watch it plunge to the bottom again.

Camus presents Sisyphus’s ceaseless and pointless task as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Project:

After reading the book and highlighting certain sentences or words – either for their intense and important meaning or their poetic/lyric qualities – I wanted to create a piece that visually explains and expresses both the importance of the book and the Greek myth itself.

For this purpose, I chose letterpress as the medium (due to the frustration it carries), and the highlighted text was used as the content for the book. The final piece (completed by June 2007) consists of three volumes that together attempt to represent the reader’s journey when reading and metaphorically refer to the Myth and our journey as human beings.

Space of Proximity, 2004

This project emerged while working—during the summer of 2004—in the letterpress workshop at the London College of Communication. I helped tidy and reorganize the whole workshop and while doing so, I found 3 huge boxes that were full of lead, old slugs, lines of text, sentences and words that have been created probably in the 1960’s-1970´s with a linotype machine. The cast words and sentences were “sitting” there waiting to be recycled, destroyed and melted down to create new words, new sentences and new meanings.

I started to select them by their singular meanings, for their visual qualities or because I could feel they had some “hidden” potential. I ended up selecting around 600 (out of more than 3 or 4.000) and randomly grouped them into galleys. Initially I lay them as columns and printed them. A “new language” emerged. It was a very powerful visual one, made out of different type fonts, different sizes and spacing that emerged by mixing them randomly.

A narrative started to emerge; a fragmented one, full of connotations and meanings and with linguistic qualities. They were no longer just visual. I started to analyze their qualities and soon I realized that they could represent, in a typographic way, the Deconstructivist theory by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

It is in that stage that I realized that I could divide the columns of text into little poems or fragmented narratives and once printed they became powerful systems of signification. 67 poetic narratives emerged and I decided to do a book.

Black Pyramid, 2022

Letterpress on Paper

London Brick 312, London 2011

Building Blocks

The brick: simple, humble, beautiful, practical, functional. Imagine London with its countless brick houses, monuments, bridges, museums. Each building contains tens of thousands of bricks. With a population of over seven and a half million people. London is made up of millions of houses, most of them made of bricks. Even a quick and vaque calculation makes us realize that London is made of tens if not hundreds of billions of bricks.

Billions of bricks. The building blocks of society.

Aside from the sheer incomprehensible quantity this represents what is inspiring is to think of the millions of people these bricks symbolise: those who made them, those who built them, those who live and work within their walls, the past they reference and the future they promise. The interest in architecture has always been present, not just from an aesthetic point of view, but a philosophical one. I view the city as a metaphor for our lives, a living organism that is perpetually evolving.

A brick can exists in and by itself, however it only takes on a meaning when placed with others. Each brick is connected in one way or another to another brick, whether next to it, somewhere else in that building, another building, another country, another time…

A townhouse in London may directly reference a Roman palace of a Greek temple. Equally, modernist architecture, though vastly different in appearance, is intimately related to the humble brick that it strives to be different from it.

One cannot exists without the other. The same is true of humans. We can of course exit as single entities, but we define who we are in relation to others. We may strive to define ourselves in clear terms, to be precise about our individual characteristics and how we differ from others, but the truth is that each one of us is a collection of universal traits and their opposites. In Chinese philosophy, this duality is best described by yin and yang, the principles of the universe.

This duality is equally present in the building blocks of architecture. The brick can be used to create or to destroy. Immobile, unused, its use is undetermined, only intention gives its function.A building can be seen both as a shelter, offering a haven from the chaos of everyday life, as a prison, creating a barrier between the individual and the world.

Chaos, 2007

Various formats.

Image 1: Shanghai Chaos. Photograph, taken with analogue Contax camera.

Image 2: Squared Chaos. Letterpress on paper.

Image 3: Diagonal Chaos. Letterpress on paper.

Image 4: Ordering Chaos. Letterpress on paper.

Skyline Under Construction, 2004 – 2007

Each city possesses a unique image, a distinctive skyline that, to some extent, reflects the rhythm, lifestyle, and energy of its inhabitants. The construction of a skyline is a deliberate process, entailing a myriad of considerations—from identity and ego to sexuality and psychology.

In this context, I aimed to experiment with the image and ideal of a city. The skyline, an imagined and essential representation, encapsulates all the elements and essence that render it recognizable and unique, like an icon. New York and London served as my primary inspirations for this project.

A skyline is not merely a visual representation; it embodies a city. Every city offers numerous angles, perspectives, and skylines, which evolve with time and weather, mirroring the changes in both the city and its inhabitants.

Cities and skylines mutate akin to living organisms, encapsulating time. Holistically grasping cities like New York or London proves impossible; we only encounter fragments, each providing a unique experience.

Various formats
Letterpress on Paper

Image 1: Fluo Skyline.

Image 2: Rhythmic Skyline.

Image 3: Black Skyline.

Image 4: Colour Skyline.

Image 5: Barbican Skyline.

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