PROYECTO EOLO
Proyecto Eolo (Eolo Project) is an associative endeavor alongside my colleague Álvaro Borobio, Spanish painter and architect (www.alvaroborobio.com), that was born from both our friendship and related artistic and conceptual ideas and concerns, as well as the desire to get involved in a collaborative venture of greater dimensions and scope, joining forces in order to develop something beyond our own capabilities and individual styles.
Thus, focusing on our mutual fascination with nature and its endless manifestations, in March 2015 we embarked on this new creative adventure, which contemplates the wind as protagonist. Proyecto Eolo arises within the context of Land Art, in which artworks are created in nature, using natural materials and integrating both physical and conceptual elements from the landscape into the final result.
The mysterious forces of the wind make it a fascinating medium: you can feel it but not see it, you can touch it but not possess it... It’s uncontrollable, unlimited and unpredictable; a very powerful wild energy whose presence keeps our planet moving.
Its interesting personality, extremely multifaceted and temperamental, makes it an extremely versatile and rich element as a means of exploration. On the one hand, wind is life, as it happens with aerial pollination; in this sense it’s also a transportation means, a potential "messenger"... It is also a fully-fledged creator, since it’s a powerful agent of erosion and sedimentation (it is the "sculptor" of nature par excellence). In addition, it constitutes one of the main sources of clean natural energy of the world (wind power). On the other hand, in its darkest sense, the wind is an immensely destructive agent, as is the case when it takes the form of tornadoes or hurricanes. For all this and more, it also symbolizes freedom, in its most literal and allegorical sense.
In Proyecto Eolo we paint with the wind and favour that it’s the strength of this main member that acts as interlocutor and merger agent of our individual styles and personalities. Eolo is the star, the true architect of all the resulting work; Álvaro and I are mere facilitators of its immense creative capacity, its channelers.
The outcomes of Proyecto Eolo are as multifaceted as its protagonist: it is at the same time painting, sculpture, photography, video art, performance, theater and dance. It is also a natural concert, since its structure produces sounds of very different and interesting rhythms and tones with the wind, which we also combine with proper music. This is key, because when it comes to enhancing the Proyecto Eolo experience and communicating it with all its wealth and strength to the public, the "added" element of music becomes fundamental, helping in this way to transmit the power of the wind’s voice, with its immense creative energy, in an enveloping and hypnotic way, and thus transport the public with us to its mystical dimension, to the eolic realm. For this we’ve had the fortune to count on the talent and experience of Raúl Sánchez, Spanish musician, producer and DJ, for the exclusive creation of an organic and completely original "soundtrack", destined for exhibitions/live performances, both in the open air, as well as for its exhibition in interior spaces such as art galleries.
One of the surprising outcomes was the spontaneous generation of eolic "creatures": true vivified "entities" that arose as we adapted the canvases and structure to be able to "listen" and discover more facets of the wind’s personality... Getting to develop, in form of cadastre, a genealogy of these, a concept that began to progressively seize the subject of the publications that we made through social media of the advances of Proyecto Eolo, as a fantastic storytelling, linked to science fiction.
Elementary architectural aspects also intervene in its development, for the works are created upon a movable structure, at the moment rudimentary, made from bamboo canes, which we display in a semicircular or linear way in the open field, where we fix meters and meters of canvas in different ways, for the pictorial results also rely on their disposition.
For their particular characteristics, the eolic canvases reach considerable dimensions: starting from one and a half meters, they get to measure up to seven or eight meters, so they easily acquire monumental formats.
Proyecto Eolo is an endless continuum, being physically and metaphysically, both in substance and form, a neverending fluid experience, with results so multifaceted, mysterious and ungovernable as the wind itself.
This way it is, in every sense, a school of learning in itself, a constant surprise and discovery, and it is for both a milestone in our lives, both personally and professionally.
It's a magical project, alive, unlimited. Without realizing it, we created something much bigger than ourselves.
Eolo is the hero of the thousand faces, an element that, with the proper attention and imagination, contains so much wisdom in it that it is truly infinite; containing so many possibilities... It is undoubtedly a spiritual, transforming experience.
So far we have exhibited Proyecto Eolo partially in several instances of exhibition and has aroused much interest. The first of these was the individual exhibition of Borobio at the Anabel Segura Cultural Center, in Madrid, during September 2015, where we deployed a "small" eolic canvas, measuring 1.7 x 1.5 meters, along with seven Proyecto Eolo photographs. People were very enthusiastic and surprised by the results (we kept a halo of suspense, completely intentional, about our joint work until then), which was really satisfactory for us.
After this first instance, we’ve both exhibited eolic canvases individually –always in unconventional ways, for we consider it fundamental not only to respect, but also emphasize their wild essence, totally free, which doesn’t lend itself much to domestication or common places of assembly–, at Madrid’s art gallery White Lab.
To be continued...