Petrologia personal : un primer reconocimiento del entorno cercano.

 

The work consists of 60 graphite drawings on acid-free paper (300 gsm), each displayed on industrially metalized cardboard pedestals. Resting atop each pedestal is a rock of variable size, creating an installation that unfolds across the wall, using it as both support and spatial anchor.

 

Earth, sand, water, rocks, and other natural elements began to emerge as new artistic materials in the late 1960s with the rise of earthworks a movement driven by the desire to transform the natural landscape into both the medium and the site of artistic creation. This gave rise to what became known as earth art or land art, a practice that redefined the relationship between art and place.

 

This work takes that historical precedent as a starting point, expanding in two directions. The first draws from the dialogue between physical location and its displaced representation, engaging with Robert Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectic. Here, the artwork oscillates between exterior (what is found, the raw material) and interior (what is interpreted, the abstract gesture). This dynamic extends to the concepts of sight/nonsight, where perception is not limited to what is visibly present, but includes what is conceptually evoked. The viewer is placed within this tension between the material presence of the rocks and the graphic translation of their form creating an interdependent chain of rocks drawings space viewer.

 

The second conceptual axis is grounded in objective realism, approached through drawing as a manual, craft-based contribution to creative thought. In this sense, the relationship between the drawing instrument and the substrate becomes a space for intellectual inquiry direct, unfiltered, and raw. Drawing here is not only a method of representation, but also a form of looking: one that unfolds slowly, where individual strokes accumulate to form a paradoxically vast and cohesive visual landscape. The lines seem to follow a path that remains partly obscured, suggesting a narrative the viewer cannot fully grasp.

 

While drawing has traditionally been associated with mimesis the imitation of nature here it challenges that very notion. Rather than proposing a direct observation of the natural world, it establishes a symbolic relationship between observer and observed. Experience, in this context, is both something one performs and something that happens to them. It is this duality that transforms the artwork into a personal record of place less about depiction and more about resonance.

 

In this way, combining the conceptual lineage of land art with the intimate gesture of drawing, the work maintains a close relationship with place and, from a certain perspective, becomes a personal description of it. The focus lies in the transformation of found natural elements in this case, rocks through formal strategies and techniques that use nature as a potential bearer of aesthetic signs. What emerges is a kind of personal petrology, a poetic and material inquiry into the nearby landscape, where nature becomes a medium of memory, meaning, and gesture.