Another World

During my travels, I have always been drawn to landscapes shaped exclusively by time and natural forces. Places where form arises from a slow, often fragile, but autonomous balance. At some point, I felt the need to seek something different: a space that, while maintaining a strong abstract and visual component, told an opposing story. Not an extension of untouched nature, but its antithesis.

The Riotinto area represents this inversion. It is one of the most compromised territories in Europe, a place where human intervention has taken on a geological scale. Centuries of mining: copper, gold, silver, and other heavy metals, have irreversibly etched the land, chemically altering the soil and water. Here, nature is no longer the sole shaping force: man has become an active part of the process, leaving deep traces.

The Riotinto river flows like an open wound. Its waters, saturated with iron oxides and acids, take on unnatural hues ranging from intense red to orange, from yellow to dark brown. The banks transform into abstract, corroded, stratified surfaces, where the boundary between sediment, rust, and water dissolves. It is a landscape that, even in its toxicity, possesses a hypnotic visual power: lines, colours, and textures that seem to belong to another planet.

Some images emerge along the river's course, where the landscape is still movement, erosion, and transport. Others take shape in the mining accumulation areas, where matter settles, stratifies, and time seems to slow down. Two different conditions, but part of the same process.

These images do not seek to denounce or absolve. They observe. They tell of a place where beauty arises from conflict, not harmony. A territory where what is fascinating is inseparable from what is disturbing. In this sense, Riotinto becomes a visual counterpoint to the primordial landscapes of the North: if there the land speaks of natural balance, here it tells of the consequences of a broken balance.

The series moves along this subtle boundary, where abstraction does not erase reality, but makes it even more evident.