The Memory of an Error

The Memory of an Error

When we correct a sculpture, it often seems as if we are removing a mistake. A proportion that no longer works. A volume that feels excessive. A decision that has aged badly. But in practice, this is rarely so simple. When I return to a piece after months or years, I do not return to a neutral block. There is already a form. There are previous cuts, previous holes, previous proportions. Something has already happened. Correction, then, is not cancellation. It is a new intervention on something that already exists. This is how I am working in the studio at the moment. I recover older pieces. I cut into them again. I separate parts that were once joined. I use holes that were made for another intention. The earlier form does not disappear. It becomes one of the conditions of the new one. And here the question of error becomes more interesting. An error in sculpture is often something we first want to eliminate. Later, with time, it can become something else: a fact of the work. A mark that can no longer be removed without removing part of the history of the form itself. At what point does something stop being an error and begin to belong to the history of the form? This question does not remain only inside the studio. We correct ourselves constantly. We change decisions, ways of thinking, relationships, places, work. But we never do it on a blank surface. Earlier versions do not vanish completely. They remain as pressure, as residue, as something that continues to act even when we believe we have left them behind. A sculpture can correct a form without fully erasing the form that was there before. Perhaps correcting does not consist in eliminating the error, but in learning what a form can still do with what it cannot erase.

Office Saint Sebastian

 Office Saint Sebastian

The figure of Saint Sebastian has always been a body marked by repetition. Arrows enter, one after another, until the surface of the body becomes a field of wounds. In this sculpture, the arrows have been replaced by something far more ordinary and contemporary: ballpoint pens. Qué et sembla amb aquestes correccions (no tant oficina sino violencia més general).....Office Saint Sebastian is built from a previous work that had remained in the studio. The old form has been reopened, cut into, and rewritten. Holes that once belonged to another intention now receive the pens. Nothing has been concealed. The cuts remain visible, as do the traces of the tools and the history of the piece. This process of rewriting is important to me. The previous sculpture is not simply replaced by a new one; it remains within it, like an earlier text beneath a new inscription. The work becomes a kind of sculptural palimpsest, where what has been erased continues to leave its mark. What interests me in the figure of Saint Sebastian here is not the classical image of spectacular martyrdom, but a quieter and more persistent form of violence. The office provides an appropriate setting for it. There are forms of aggression that do not need to be dramatic to be effective: repetition, pressure, exclusion, hierarchy, the accumulation of small gestures. The pens are deliberately ordinary. They belong to a world of offices, forms, signatures and instructions. In another context they are instruments of communication; here, inserted into the body, they become instruments of puncture. Something as familiar as a pen acquires another meaning when it crosses the boundary between writing and wounding. The martyr is no longer pierced by arrows. He is marked by the ordinary. As in other recent works, the scars of the process are not erased. The previous form is not cancelled. What remains is a body that has been worked, interrupted and rewritten — a body carrying the evidence of what has happened to it. The martyr of the office does not die dramatically. He continues.

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.