Evil Stream

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 a certain point, I felt the need to seek something different: a space that, while maintaining a strong abstract and visual component, told an opposite story. Not an extension of unspoiled nature, but its antithesis.

The Riotinto area represents this inversion. It is one of Europe's most compromised territories, a place where human intervention has taken on a geological scale. Centuries of mining: copper, gold, silver, and other heavy metals, have irreversibly scarred 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 profound 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, despite its toxicity, possesses a hypnotic visual power: lines, colours, and textures that seem to belong to another planet.

Some images are born along the river, where the landscape is still movement, erosion, and dragging. Others take shape in mining accumulation areas, where matter stops, 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 is born from conflict, not harmony. A territory where what fascinates is inseparable from what disturbs. In this sense, Riotinto becomes a visual counterpoint to the primordial landscapes of the North: if there the earth 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.