by Luis Sicre
The series Bad Lands and Tibet are two different ways of approaching one of the oldest topics in art: transcendent. In both, earth becomes the very centre of attention, reconsidered as an archaeological evidence, indication of life, abstraction of the core of time and space. The artist outlines an analogy between this concept and the beauty, which idea is recreated in a canon where the sublime, the pathetic, the dreadful and the barbaric coexist.
Bad Lands immerses us in the mysticism of the Painted Desert of Arizona, in the United States. This location is distinguished by a type of rocky accident profoundly marked by sedimentation. The mountains become a crucial motive. The artist recreates them as capsules, condensations, colossal bodies that express the overwhelming leap of the geological ages. The forms are constituted of linear residues, each one of them a sign and an axis of a past horizon. Here, time ceases to be a transitory phenomenon and transform into a concrete fact and monument.
Tibet enable us to enter one of the most remarkable geographies of the contemporary world: the northern plateau of the Himalayas, known as The Roof of the World. It is as well a comment on the impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Tibetan Buddhism. The most frequent idea in this series is transformation: even though nature conditions culture and vice versa, in this peculiar scenery there are no seeming dualities; on the contrary, every accident or phenomenon is integrated into a single body. Thus, the architectural ruin acquires as much relevance as a synthesis of every possible conflict or metamorphosis.
