The theme of food has always been present in my thoughts about art, right from my very first steps, because I am always searching for what is essential. This thought immediately leads to traces of liquids, salts, creams, and spices in all their immediacy, and the addition of anything to them becomes an extra, something baroque and sickening.
I began to inquire into the meaning of food and luxury and of their mutual relationships, with the idea of using this as a starting point for a series of works that might indicate a path between personal impulses and originality.
In the long series of videos called El Comensal the scenes begin with a rigorously constructed set suggesting the pictorial composition of a still-life. The introito terribilis consists of the opulent cutlery and foods of this consumer: we never see who it is but we are forced to watch his mechanical, implacable gestures until the raw and grotesque end, when we see wasted food which might actually be something else.
Later on a tiny fragmented body from the series Los Regalos raises, with a slender and ambiguous arm, regal chalices or, with tremulous and perhaps even dying gestures, accepts precious gifts which it cannot carry. After endless discussions in various university workshops and courses, certain symbols began to take on great importance in my works, and the substantial material reflects this weighty symbolism. El sabor de la primer manzana perhaps already hints at this, although in the form of an almost dreamlike and fleeting vision.
But in carrying out these ideas all the force of the flesh made its presence felt. This was a result both of a synthesis of my own origins and of a close study of a recurring, at times emblematic, subject in art history. Yet again a side of beef becomes the subject. Fragmentation takes place at the butcher's. Hands make repeated and precise cuts with the use of a brutally electric blade. Without loss of blood and in silence the meat undergoes complete fragmentation to the point where the bones are pulverised. On the banal and mirroring steel of the butcher an ancient rite comes to life again, evoking other butchers and butchery. (see biography)
