Aurelio San Pedro

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

Aurelio San Pedro (Barcelona, 1983) draws with great delicacy, focusing his attention on natural settings and favoring black and white. Memory plays a crucial role in his creative process, which is based on treating recollection as a means of artistic expression. His background in engineering and topography influences his search for inspiring images, helping him select the ideal landscapes—ones that stem from both real and imagined places.

Each of his pieces follows a slow and meticulous process, requiring deep introspection. Paper is almost a fetish for him; both the areas he chooses to intervene in and those he leaves blank hold equal importance. He navigates between abstraction and figuration while maintaining a distinctive and deeply resonant style.

Return to Oneself. From the series Books and Landscapes. 2024. Mixed media. 100 x 100 cm.

What role does experimentation play in your creative process?

Experimentation is fundamental in my creative process, both conceptually and aesthetically. My work evolves in parallel with unfolding events, gradually shaping what will become the final piece. However, in terms of production, the role of experimentation depends heavily on the series I am working on at the time.

For example, in the Books series, which is created using book fragments, three-dimensionality is essential. While working on it, I encountered trial and error, residue, simplification, and the streamlining of processes.

In contrast, when it comes to drawings, physical experimentation is much less pronounced. However, there are still discoveries, searches for tools, trials, and shifts within the working process. For instance, in Landscapes, I use a pencil with three extenders that measures about fifty to sixty centimeters. In my two latest series, Iceland and Nature, I had to learn how to move and position myself within nature, while also refining my drawing technique significantly.

Always Stumbled Upon the Same Stone.Detail. From the series Books and Landscapes. 2024. Mixed media. 10 x 19 cm.

What are your references?

I cannot pinpoint specific aesthetic influences, but I can mention those who have left a mark on my artistic journey. First and foremost, my father, due to his connection with art and architecture. I also had the privilege of learning for a year in the studio of Antoni Marqués, a renowned Catalan artist.

Historically, the works of Magritte and Joseph Kosuth have had a profound influence on me. Formally, I find a certain connection with Arte Povera, and I identify with minimalism.

Twenty Dark Episodes. 2024. From the series Books and Landscapes. Mixed media. 100 x 100 cm.

How do memory and recollection influence your drawings?

Much of my work, if not all, is rooted in memory. I began with the Diane series, a collection of pencil drawings based on old photographs by Diane Arbus. In these drawings, I removed the main subjects, leaving only the backgrounds. They were complemented by diptychs that included descriptions of the absent characters, the location where the photograph was taken, and the year. This approach created a dialogue between presence and absence, exploring themes of memory and recollection.

Later, I worked on Landscapes, a much more ethereal series in which I sought to represent an idealized and undefined image through personal memory. Currently, I am developing Nature and Iceland, projects that reflect on natural memory in relation to the landscape’s own form.

I am interested in posing questions such as: How did this rock end up here? How was this meandering river formed? A simple landscape holds countless traces and processes. For me, that is the essence of memory in my work.

ST.3. From the series Iceland. 2024. Pencil on paper. 120 x 100 cm.

How long does it take you to complete your works?

The time I dedicate to each piece depends mainly on its complexity and specific characteristics. Generally, I spend between two and four weeks on each piece, with an average of about three weeks. This varies, as some works require more time for reflection, adjustments, or details, while others emerge more fluidly. The diversity of the creative process is what makes the difference, each piece has its own demands and rhythms, making every artistic experience unique.

Return to Oneself. From the series Books and Landscapes. 2024. Mixed media. 100 x 100 cm.

Why do you choose to work in black and white?

I am deeply drawn to black and white for its timelessness. This visual approach not only eliminates distractions but also removes certain details that might diminish the work’s mystery, allowing the viewer to focus on the essential. The absence of color and the diffuse light I use contribute to a sense of distortion and vagueness, which, to me, enhances the enigmatic nature of the image.

By omitting volume and color, I create an atmosphere that invites interpretation, leaving room for the viewer to project their own narrative onto what they see. This quality of uncertainty and suggestion is what I find so powerful about working in black and white.

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.