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.