Born in 1954 in the Villa of Mazo, a Spanish municipality situated in the island of La Palma in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Canary Islands. Bachelor of Fine Arts. Founding member of the Art group Apresto, currently exhibiting its project “Artemages” in the islands.

He has taught painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife as well as plastic and Visual Arts at Secondary School, combining for many years both his teaching labour with his professional artistic activities, until he quit his pedagogic tasks to fully engage in his painting.

He works in the city of San Cristobal de La Laguna, where he has his art studio and his habitual residence. Painting, with which he mostly identifies, is his artistic means of expression and has always been part of his artistic trajectory. Oil painting, acrylic painting, watercolour painting and graphite drawing are the techniques that are generally present in his work. Photography also occupies an important space in his artistic endeavour.

The recurrent themes in my work, specially over the last twenty years, have been the traces, the spaces of confluence and their transformations, the loss of identity, the artificial spaces, oblivion and indifference, the residual, the place as absence, the relation with nature as an habitat and the cosmos as a question, the perspectives truncated, the mind conquered and the conscience lost.

I formulate the work in series as a way of using different words and establishing distinct reasoning to talk about the same worries, those that form part of my personal ideas. A way of communicating the same ideas that underlie as the deposits of what reality generates in me.

After the series developed taking as visual referents the creation of encompassing atmospheres where forms tended to lose their identities, as a kind of filter that led the particular to its loss of identity, the present work focuses on a constant process of deconstruction that intends to convert the image into a diffused space, and thus, open to infinite interpretations.

The latest projects have been the series Ex-sistencia”, “Des-signación” and “Passarola”.

“EX-SISTENCIA”  I understand “/-s/existence” to be an ontological category that deals with the experiences and expressions of beings.
“To ex-ist” is to be outside, to be thrown outside, with no possible without any possible inner foothold, without subjectivity, responding automatically to external calls,
as irrational beings, simple machines guided by an absent control, disguised as progress, freedom and competitiveness.

“DES-SIGNACIÓN”  The series des-signación is part of the project Re-sistencia, considering the sistencia as an ontological category that deals with the beings’ experiences and expression. The prefix Re intensifies these actions and reaffirm the need of the human being to learn how to access the mystery of his being, of his own reality, and in time, to be open to other realities, those of the rest of the living beings and the world.
Des-signación is essentially an exercise of release. Our relation with things, with other beings and with the world is loaded with signs, of designations that others establish, that power prescribes as truths, signifiers that we end up assuming as norms or laws, which without being totally that, they directly condition as much as laws, but underhanded, masked, concealed, and erect walls in each epoch and delimit cohabitation, relations and freedom.
It becomes a priority to erase those traces, reconsider the paths marked by power, release some loads that, through history and culture, we have assumed and which hinder our movement, mostly because we already know that the human being has marked a clear and safe way towards self-destruction, in the sense of changing and modifying drastically the natural conditions that have made possible a type of life and relation with the planet and the universe during so many centuries. Looking exclusively at the future from the tortured present, acting like robots guided by so many signs and signifiers that basically respond to the interests of economic power, is simply to get carried away by that which the system proposes as a way out and a solution for the serious problems that it has generated. The greatest sign of failure, that we as human beings can admit, is to wait for the new signs created by power to orient our steps towards the future. It would be to go in depth, delve into and burden with everything that has placed us in this situation.
To this end, the first thing to do is to stop, try to de-signify all that determines our step, that has been presented to us as invariable, fixed and permanent. The des-signation is the first step to win, at least, certain areas of real freedom. At des-signying them, all the signs, that is to say the certainties, are questioned, by eliminating the dominant coat of intentionality, slaver, oppressive and controller with which power covers them. The certainties impose an ordinariness that calms us, soothes us, numbs us, holds us back, they tell us what we have to think and how we have to think about it. To de-signate situates us out of this scope, it separates us form the present, from the heavy air that immobilizes, from the comfort zone, from tendency, as Alberto Savino says: “to look for the simplest, to disregard obscurities (…) to make of life an interrupted series of vowels (…).” On the contrary, it brings us closer to an anchoritic position that, as Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego says, the flight of the anchorite to the desert “is less to yearn for a new life than for the death of the past: Evasion from one’s history. To break bonds represents breaking free from the chains that enslave us in the social domains.”
To de-signate requires, in the same way, to position oneself in a virginal space, as an initiatory metaphor, the beginning, natural state, dawn of civilization. Emancipating from the present “aeiouismo” that Savinio talks about. A space that allows us to re-write our own history, now lighter, with a certain nomad spirit. Less subjected to “sacred” entities, to concepts that are worthwhile giving one’s life. Knowing full well that the world cannot be changed, among other things because time is at a premium, because every time since a long time ago it is too late, as George Perec says, because nothing makes us think the contrary, we still have to, from the personal, create a light, mild and weightless space, in continuous transformation, without pivots strongly tied to the floor, without determinisms or idols to whom we should keep obeisance. What is left is to retreat, be absent, dissociate, run away from the nets that the system extends and society ends up assuming as if this were the only viable possibility. What remains is to resist in spaces which because of their infinity, immensity and marginality, escape from the scopes of control, nuclei of resistance, says Gianni Vattim, as those medieval monasteries where manuscripts were copied. To wait patiently because life, in addition, and most of all, can be void of an objective. To wait, to calm down because this is in itself a revolutionary attitude and, maybe, the greatest possible act of resistance. To abandon the straight trajectory, the continuous and accelerated advance, to go ahead without knowing where, as if carried away in the air by the social movement impulse by the capitalist system, by the system of industrial and technological world production.
To wait and do nothing, for, as Spinoza says: “Only when I can do nothing I can think it all.” We are in a moment of the history of humanity where we have to think it all and, moreover, we should not forget the great questions that we have been bringing up for three thousand years now, not so much as to find answers but rather to let them become the germs of new questions.
To wait, contemplate, look far away and maybe in this way we ask ourselves, as the narrator asks the character in Un Hombre Que Duerme by George Perec, how is it possible that you haven’t “Known anything about what today is already inexorable,” “in what you call your history, haven’t you ever seen fissures?” In which world have we lived? Have I been able to raise a world of my own or have I simply lived in the one that has been dictated for me?
To wait. A serene waiting, says Heidegger and, thus perceive, as Herman Hess “certain humour from the air and the clouds, certain nuances in the colours or certain changes in the fragrance and moisture” and, from the same space, a space without places, the desertic and neutral space which Lefebvre talks about when he deals with Barthe’s Degree Zero, watching the hours and the days passing by and threshing what was lost from them until now, abandoned by the nervous looks, precipitated, disquiet, without the capacity of perception. To wait for the shadows to arrive, for the brightness to sleep, and the soft and enveloping tones become connected with each other to construct all the landscape, with no cuts, without leaps, as a permanent continuum and an unhurried transformation.
To wait, and maybe, luckily, melancholy can reach us, a sign that thinking has been activated. To wait and let go because “if you want to hear the whispering,” says Hermann Hess, you have to suffer the howling too, “you are a bird in the middle of a storm, let it roar! Let go!”
To kill the past is to deconstruct it in such a way that we could, in that effort, become aware of everything that has been imposed on us for some centuries now, signifiers that also determine our individualization. In this path, the main objective is, as Michel Foucault says “to reject what we are,” create new subjectivities. If human being is not reality but rather possibility, following Heidegger, only one’s personal construction can give access to one’s freedom. To leave, what is in essence, one’s nature in the hands of power is to stop being.  

“PASSAROLA”  I approach Saramago’s work from my own dialectics, acknowledged as close, analogous in many aspects, to the work and the thoughts of the Portuguese writer when it comes to sharing reflections, meditations and ideas that he as well as his characters speak. His texts reflect on the world and the human being that inhabits it. They reflect on the conflictive past, the accelerated and non-reflexive present, and the absent future. Saramago regards his own novels as essays with characters, the idea that my visual art project sustains. His characters speak so much, or even more, to underpin general arguments that reflect on the meaning of existence and the role that the human being plays as a temporal inhabitant of the planet, so as to offer continuity to a narrative fact. Once these texts get together, they become part of a new reflexive element that tries to give the visual arts work homogeneity, based on the constancy of certain graphical elements, depositories of the mentioned core concepts. We could say that these texts together with the visual arts work that provide corporeity form a narrative without characters.

In this sense, it is the general axioms and the generic considerations taken from the narrative context itself that sustain, support, reaffirm and project the argumentations and the pictorial narrative that have principally always been present in my artistic trajectory.

Education

Bachelor  of Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna, Tenerife.

Latest exhibitions

2023  Fine Arts Museum  «EX-SISTENCIA» Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tenerife -INDIVIDUAL-

2022  Abama Art Gallery «PASSAROLA sueño y conciencia. Sobre textos de J.Saramago» Guía de Isora, Tenerife -TWO-PERSON- / Hermitage of San Antonio Exhibition Hall  «PASSAROLA sueño y conciencia. Sobre textos de J.Saramago» Tías, Lanzarote -INDIVIDUAL- / Obispo Art Gallery «Paisajes Internos» Costa Adeje, Tenerife -COLLECTIVE-

2021 The House of Culture «And-as» Los Realejos, Tenerife -TWO-PERSON-

2020  Casa Mané Art Centre «And-as» La Oliva, Fuerteventura -TWO-PERSON-

2018  Artenmala Gallery «Con el viento». Mala, Haría, Lanzarote  / 33 Contemporary Gallery » With the Wind» Chicago, EE.UU. / El Aljibe Exhibition Hall -Lanzarote Art Gallery- «[con]fluencia» Haría, Lanzarote. / «2018»  Santo Domingo Art Centre -Lanzarote Art Gallery- Teguise, Lanzarote -COLLECTIVES-

2017  Fine Arts Museum “Passarola. Sueño y conciencia” Sobre textos de José Saramago. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUAL- / Artenmala Gallery “Animalalia”, Haría, Lanzarote. / Casa Mané Art Centre, La Oliva, Fuerteventura. / Santo Domingo Art Centre, Teguise, Lanzarote. / El Charco Exhibition Hall, Arrecife Lanzarote. / Ermita San Antonio Art Hall, Tías, Lanzarote.  “ARTEMAGES. Palabras que a veces son colores. -Leyendo a José Saramago-“  –COLLECTIVES-

2016   Fleming Art Hall “Confín”. Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUAL- // Centro de Iniciativas de la Caja de Canarias -CICCA- . Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. / La Recova Art Centre. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. “ARTEMAGES. Palabras que a veces son colores. -Leyendo a José Saramago-“ -COLLECTIVES-

2015   Granadilla Etnográphic Museum “Granadilla con nombre de mujer”. Granadilla de Abona,Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-.  // Enmala Arte Gallery “A-Cierto”.  Mala, Lanzarote. -COLLECTIVE-

2014   Fleming Art Hall “Arte a cien”. Puerto de la Cruz. Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-

2013  San Luís Obispo Franciscan Convent  “Confín”. Granadilla de Abona, Tenerife.-INDIVIDUAL- // La Recova Art Centre “Interiores”. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-. // San Isidro “Cultura Centre Homenaje al libro”.  Granadilla, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-

2012  La Recova Art Centre “Testigo”. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUAL- // Art Septem Gallery “Silencio”. Hermigua, La Gomera. -INDIVIDUAL- // Hueco Art Centre “Minimun”. Santa Cruz, La Palma. -COLLECTIVE. // Art Septem Gallery. Hermigua, La Gomera. -COLECTIVA-. // Art Septem Gallery. Hermigua, La Gomera. -COLECTIVA-. // Exilus Art Gallery, Granadilla de Abona, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-.

2011  Casa de la Cultura “Silencio”.  Adeje, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUAL- // Antiguo Convento de Santo Domingo “Salinas”. La Laguna, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-

2006  Santo Domingo Art Centre “De la isla de fuego a la isla habitáculo”. Teguise, Lanzarote. -COLLECTIVE-.

2005  Palacio Salazar Gallery “Silencio”. Santa Cruz, La Palma. -INDIVIDUAL- // Casa Massieu “Salinas”. Tazacorte, La Palma. -COLLECTIVE-. // Juan Ismael Art Centre “Con título”. Puerto del Rosario, Fuerteventura. -COLLECTIVE-.

2004  La Trasera del Leal Art Gallery  “Silencio”. La Laguna, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUAL-

2003  Real Club Náutico de Santa Cruz de Tenerife “Maestros”. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE- // Casa Colón. “VI Certamen de fotografía de la Caja Rural de Canarias”. Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.

2001  Real Club Náutico de Santa Cruz de Tenerife “III Premio de Pintura”. Santa Cruz, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-

2000  Superior Educatión Centre of the  University of la Laguna. La Laguna, Tenerife. / Casa de la Cultura “Fiestas Populares de Tenerife”. Garachico, Tenerife. -INDIVIDUALES- // BBVA Exhibition Halls. Barcelona. /  Museu d´Art  Moderno Tarragona “Perpetua singularidad”. -COLLECTIVES// Historia de Tenerife  Museum “La tierra de las estrellas”. La Laguna, Tenerife. -COLLECTIVE-

Awards

First Prize Pianting Award, 2001. Real Club Náutico de Santa Cruz de Tenerife.