Gastón Lisak

CCONVERSATIONS WITH MARISOL SALANOVA. INTERVIEW PROGRAM. ART MADRID'25

Gastón Lisak (Barcelona, 1989) approaches conceptual art through a path deeply tied to his teaching experience, the facilitation of workshops, and experimenting with collective creations. His work is rooted in meticulous research into mundane archaeology, exploring the transformation of anachronistic objects.

With a background in design, much of his work intersects with industrial processes. Applying industrial techniques to art, working with waste materials, and transforming them into friezes results in pieces of immense appeal. Lisak seeks beauty in what is discarded, in the abject, challenging the contemporary concept of hyperproduction. Ultimately, his goal is to make us stop and observe what might otherwise go unnoticed. Playfulness is ever-present, reflecting his interest in learning and material recovery.

Polyptych. Gastón Lisak Exhibition: Mundane Archaeology, curated by Mariella Franzoni, La Sala Centre d'Art Vilanova i la Geltrú, 2023. Photograph by Roberto Ruiz.

What role does experimentation play in your creative process?

I believe experimentation plays a crucial role in my work—whether it's with new materials or industrial processes that I adapt to the art world. Experimentation is closely linked to the uncertainty of how a piece will turn out.

We live in a time when we have access to vast amounts of information—everything seems perfect, the entire system is polished. But experimentation involves error, things not turning out as expected, surprises, and discoveries.

My work is heavily centered on understanding societies through the objects we use. A mass-produced object—something hyper-new, like a spinner or a tiny figurine—appears everywhere, only to vanish into obscurity.

Through art and this process of rediscovering objects from our surroundings, we can help future generations—50, 100, or even 200 years from now—understand how we once lived. My work essentially preserves a snapshot of a specific moment in art history and in the world we're living in today.

Mundane Archaeology. 2022. Photography on aluminum. 100 x 70 cm.

Who are your references?

Like many people, most of my references come from those around me—individuals I grow with every day. However, I did spend some time in England, where I was fascinated by the Fluxus movement. Its chaos contained in boxes—the mix of disorder and absolute structure—was captivating. Similarly, randomness, the unexpected, and the accidental have always intrigued me.

I also admire Pistoletto's Arte Povera—the act of repurposing and giving new meaning to everyday objects. Antoni Miralda’s compulsive obsession with objects, his ability to listen to them and understand them, has deeply influenced my work.

Currently, artists like Joana Vasconcelos inspire me with her ability to rediscover, rethink, and recontextualize objects. Beyond individuals, markets are a great source of inspiration for me. Markets are like open-air museums that are constantly changing. When you visit them, you encounter strange objects that draw you in, making you want to learn about their origins, purpose, and stories.

Much of my inspiration stems from everyday life—small interactions, mistakes, the amateur, the ugly, the odd, and the bizarre elements of daily existence. I often try to add a twist to the mundane, to the monotonous cycles of life, transforming them into something new and different each day.

Metal Touch. 2022. Sacred Plastic Collection.

How do you select the objects that inspire you?

Sometimes the objects choose me, and other times, I choose them. Often, I’m drawn to strange objects that don’t make sense or that I don’t fully understand.

For instance, marine items are a recurring element in my work—objects from the sea or nature, as well as hyper-contemporary objects. How can we transform something ephemeral, like a plate of food, into a permanent piece—a sculpture, a totem, something enduring? How can we turn something small into something monumental?

Markets are great for discovery. Layer by layer, you can explore: What happens if I look closer? Those objects that might lack voice or presence can be transformed through art, giving them a new meaning and place.

When I transform objects and give them a new purpose, they become spaces for sharing thoughts about how we live today. It’s important that these objects are accessible and easy to connect with. In our environment, there’s a lot of visual noise—chaos, stimuli. Everything competes for our attention. Through art, I strive to create moments of pause: Stop. Breathe. Understand. Value what surrounds you.

Art, in this sense, is an exercise in thought, offering an opportunity for action both to the viewer and the creator. It’s a space for inspiration and change. While we may not change the world overnight, art can inspire small shifts in perspective, enabling us to see life differently.

I’ve also noticed that many of the objects in my work appear in different places. An object I see in a market in Buenos Aires might also appear in Chile or at Mexico’s La Lagunilla market. These objects travel globally, which fascinates me. Many objects in my work have a history—they’ve been seen and lived elsewhere before they reached me.

View of the ex-votos in the exhibition at the Fundación Espai Guinovart. Agramunt. 2023.

What role does nature play in your work?

I grew up near the sea, and I love it. It’s always been a part of my life. When working with objects, if you look at cabinets of curiosities, you’ll notice that humans have always been compelled to document, collect, and possess nature.

Markets often have remnants of nature—like shells or corals—that are admired in their original environment. This raises the question: What is nature today? How do humans impact it? We can’t view nature as separate from ourselves—it’s an ecosystem where everything coexists, even within the objects we create.

There’s little sense in the mass production of trendy, disposable objects, but art allows us to reflect on questions of consumption: What do we consume? How? Why? Does it make sense today?

Nature’s ability to inspire is also powerful. The sea, shells, and the mysteries of the underwater world captivate me. Observing our surroundings through a scientific lens—like a laboratory—helps us learn more about the world. When I analyze objects systematically in a market, it’s similar to how someone might study an ant or butterfly in a lab.

Ketchup. 2022. Sacred Plastic Collection.

When do you feel a piece in a series is complete?

For me, the end of a piece is as important as its creation. The process involves a journey and discovery that lead to the final work.

The conclusion is significant, but so is the story behind it. A piece is finished when you feel it is, but its value lies not only in the final result but in the time and journey it took to get there.

A phrase that inspires me is “to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar” by the German poet Novalis. It resonates because it’s fascinating to see how familiar objects can be transformed into something magical, distinct, and extraordinary.

I’ve become obsessed with this dichotomy between the familiar and the strange. Through curiosity and discovery, we can question and understand how we live today. This creates a pause, a moment to reflect.

We live in a fast-paced world, constantly on the move. Art offers us the opportunity to pause, reflect, and breathe.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.