Nocturne of the Hollow

 

In sculpture, the void is rarely empty.

It is an active presence.

Nocturne of the Hollow is built around a decision not to fill. The lower body remains relatively solid, grounded, almost classical in its weight. Above it, the structure opens. Wood is stacked, interrupted, left incomplete. At the centre of the torso, a hollow appears — not as a deficiency, but as a structural and conceptual choice.

I have long been interested in the idea that what is removed continues to act. The tool marks left on the surface are not accidents to be corrected; they are traces of a process that refuses erasure. The cut becomes a form of writing. The scar, in this sense, is not merely the memory of damage but a productive surface — a place where meaning continues to be generated.

The hollow at the core of the figure works in a similar way. It holds tension rather than resolving it. It prevents the body from closing into a stable, self-sufficient form. The asymmetry is deliberately left unresolved, because correcting it would neutralise what the piece is trying to sustain: an imbalance that remains active.

There is an echo, distant but deliberate, of Lorca’s Nocturno del hueco. What interests me in that title is not the possibility of illustration, but the recognition that a hollow can be more than absence. It can become a space that demands attention, a void around which the surrounding forms organise themselves.

This is perhaps what interests me most about the sculpture: the negative space is not the opposite of form.

It is one of its conditions.

The figure stands because of what is missing as much as because of what remains.

The hollow does not weaken the structure.

It concentrates it.

 

The Wound That Precedes Me II

 The Wound That Precedes Me II

This second piece in the series continues the exploration of the fractured self, but from a slightly different angle — both literally and conceptually. Once again built from reclaimed wood rather than carved from a single block, the sculpture feels even more unstable, as if the act of splitting the head has become more violent, more definitive.

In The Wound That Precedes Me II, the two halves of the face seem less like mirror images and more like competing versions of the same being. One side appears heavier, more damaged; the other sharper, almost defiant. Wooden sticks pierce the structure like remnants of an invisible violence or attempts at reconstruction that failed.

The work insists on the idea that our most profound wounds are not acquired along the way — they precede us. They are the condition from which identity is born. The sculpture does not offer resolution or healing. Instead, it presents the fracture as an original state: the crack through which we emerge into existence.

By leaving the wood raw, cracked, and visibly assembled, the piece becomes a physical manifestation of Deleuze’s notion of the scar as a productive surface — not a mark of lack, but a site where new meaning can be generated. What we call “I” might simply be the ongoing negotiation with a wound that was already there before we arrived.

The Wound That Precedes Me

The Wound That Precedes Me

This sculpture is not carved from a single block, but constructed by joining three distinct pieces of reclaimed wood. The act of assembling them, and then violently splitting the head vertically, became the central gesture of the work.

The Wound That Precedes Me explores the idea that our deepest fractures pre-exist us. The piece speaks of a wound that is not only the result of experience, but a condition that precedes the formation of the self. The two halves of the face — different in expression and texture — coexist in an unstable unity, as if they belonged to two parallel identities struggling within the same body.

By using reclaimed wood and assembling separate fragments, the sculpture itself becomes a metaphor: we are not born whole, but built from pieces that carry their own histories, cracks, and memories. The raw cut through the head does not seek reconciliation; it exposes the tension and the beauty of the broken.

In this sense, the work aligns with Deleuze’s notion of the event and the scar as a productive surface — a place where meaning is generated precisely because of the fracture. What we call identity may be nothing more than the continuous negotiation with a wound that was already there before we arrived.

wood

56 x 26 x 20 cmts

If this piece resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What wounds do you carry that preceded you? Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message.

 

Childhood Drawings and Mature Sculpture: When Contradictions Coexist

 

One of the most unexpected turns in my recent work has been the incorporation of children’s drawings into my sculpture. As an art teacher at Lliçà d’Amunt, I spend many hours surrounded by the raw, spontaneous, and often wildly imaginative marks made by children. What began as simple observation has slowly become a deliberate dialogue within my own practice.

We live in an era of deep crisis of representation. Traditional ways of depicting reality feel exhausted, saturated by images, and disconnected from authentic experience. In this context, my approach to representation has become increasingly playful — almost childlike. I find in the uninhibited gesture of children’s drawings a form of freedom and directness that much contemporary art seems to have lost.

At first glance, nothing could seem more contradictory: the naive, immediate, and joyful line of a child next to the heavy, scarred, and existentially charged presence of my reclaimed wood sculptures. One is light and free of self-consciousness; the other is slow, labored, and full of memory.

And yet, in art, the principle of non-contradiction does not apply.

The childish drawing does not weaken the seriousness of the sculpture — it cracks it open. It introduces irony, tenderness, and a kind of raw honesty. Suddenly, the heavy wooden figure carries within it the ghost of a child’s hand — a reminder that we are all, at once, complex adults and former children still trying to make sense of the world through play.

This coexistence has become central to pieces in the Man and Other Animals series and in some recent heads and figures. The children’s lines act as another layer in the palimpsest. They remind us that identity is never a finished construction, but a constant negotiation between different versions of ourselves — the innocent and the wounded, the playful and the grave.

By allowing these two apparently incompatible languages to inhabit the same body of work, I am exploring a deeper truth: that in times of crisis of representation, perhaps the most honest way to represent is through play.

In art, contradiction is not a problem to solve.

It is a space where life can breathe.

The Scar as Palimpsest: Deleuze, Reclaimed Wood, and the Logic of Becoming

 

In Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, the scar is far more than the remnant of a healed wound. It is a productive surface — a site where the event leaves its mark and new meaning is generated. The scar does not erase the past; it incorporates it, transforming the body into a living record of what has happened.

This idea has become central to my sculptural practice.

I work almost exclusively with reclaimed wood — material that already carries its own biography of growth, violence, use, abandonment and recovery. Every crack, knot, nail hole and weathered surface is a scar. Rather than hiding these traces, I allow them to remain visible, even to become protagonists. Through carving, assembling and painting, I turn these fragments into human figures that speak of fragility, memory and reinvention.

The series Nazareno is perhaps the clearest example. Begun in 2018 as a hybrid between the traditional penitent and Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway scene, the work was interrupted by a deep personal crisis. For years it remained unfinished in the studio — a body suspended in time. When I returned to it years later, I did not attempt to restore it to an imagined “original” state. Instead, I worked with its scars. The cracks, changes in tone and signs of neglect became integral to the final piece.

In this way, the sculpture becomes a true palimpsest: a body that carries multiple temporal layers simultaneously. The wood’s own history dialogues with my interventions, creating figures that are simultaneously broken and resilient, wounded and reborn.

Deleuze teaches us that sense is produced on the surface, not hidden beneath it. My sculptures attempt to make that surface visible — raw, honest, and profoundly human.

Fragile Constructions Sculptural project

 Fragile Constructions Sculptural project 

Joan Priego’s sculptural practice revolves around a deliberate and fragmentary process of construction in which materiality and process become central concepts to explore the forging of individual and collective identity, as well as the symbolic construction of the city. 

Born in Barcelona in 1969, Priego works primarily with reclaimed wood from demolished buildings and felled urban trees. He carves, polychromes and assembles it into figures of corporeal yet vulnerable presence: truncated torsos, hybrid bodies and human fragments that function as metaphors for a fractured postmodern subjectivity. 

The project is structured around three intertwined axes: the construction of identity (individual and collective), sculptural construction as process (carving, materiality, assembly and transformation), and the construction of the city as a permanently unfinished palimpsest. Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Priego conceives the contemporary subject as a multiplicity of fragments and masks. Each sculpture emerges from the meticulous selection of reclaimed woods — where scars, nails and time-worn veins remain visible beneath the artist’s intervention. 

This material gesture runs parallel to the symbolic construction of the self: an identity recomposed from ruins, negotiating memory, belonging and resistance in a context saturated by consumerism, tourism and gentrification. 

The city, like the reclaimed wood, is continuously built and unbuilt; its inherited materials are transformed into new forms while preserving traces of the past. Priego’s work does not illustrate Barcelona — it interrogates it from within, offering a sensitive cartography of how collective narratives are built and dismantled.