Art should say about us, or let us know about ourselves

things that are foreign to what history suggests.

The love of art is the love of the truth and there is nothing that has more lies than history.

Would there be artistic activity that spans all the times?

Artistic activities span all the times because they go through all the bodies

And what would they express?

Virtues, sensory and motor qualities of the bodies that are trapped in that culture.

Of a way of being?

It’s more like a way of feeling.

Interview conducted by José Diaz Cuyás to Angel Gonzalez Garcia. Madrid 2014

Talking about pottery is always a challenge. It is an unstable and magical matter that has a deep anthropological meaning. In it, concepts such as “artificial” and “natural” are diluted; they join in their technical creation and in knowledge; and in its observation, eye, hand, and mind are simultaneously activated. Nicolás Bonilla Maldonado (Bogotá, 1984) has devoted more than 15 years to explore the plastic possibilities of pottery that goes beyond its meaning as a utilitarian matter. He starts from a primitive aspect of this technique, by joining applied sciences and visual arts.

Tierra de Serpientes is his first individual exhibition for La Cometa Madrid. It is above all an expeditionary project, where he systematically describes what is real in an almost encyclopedic and illustrated way. The artist visited 15 sites with the Apex geological service, where he collected wild clay for making more than 3000 rocks by hand.

Bonilla Maldonado made the rocks by using open fire pottery techniques such as pit firing and saggar. He presents them to us a in a precise catalog that is part of his open investigation of “Tierra de Serpientes”(land of snakes), a territory of the Iberian Peninsula, designated by the Greek as Ophioússa, due to the presence of these reptiles in the landscape.

To understand Nicolás’s works, repetition and its impact on the elaboration process and on the way of thinking are important. Although it would seem to be a mechanized project or even an obsession, it is much more, it is a ritual act, that connects not only with past generations, but with diverse cultures and times. It is a rhythmical process, that has pauses where you can hear not only the hand, but also the matter.

The scale of each rock is to a certain degree the scale of the artist’s hand gesture, in a process that the sociologist Richard Sennett describes as “repetition for its own sake: like a swimmer’s stroke, sheer movement repeated becomes a pleasure in itself.”

The relationship with what is ritual can also be seen in the repeated shapes of the rocks, that is typical of primitive funerary stelas and megalithic menhirs, that are related to the author’s archeological education. Finally, we find a cyclic rhythm in the transformation of the rock to clay, and of the clay to rock, without altering its internal composition.

In each of these places of research, that go from the Sil Canyon to Lanzarote, and that are paired with graphic documents, tools, and manuals, the artist induces us to reflect upon his role as someone who discloses the processes of reality construction. The way in which the rocks are presented, as the outcome of an imperfect manual process where fire and smoke produce a random effect on their elaboration, contrasts with the precise and taxonomic display cabinets, that are typical of scientific practice.

The convergence of these two fields of thought gives rise to questions about the role of languages in our understanding of the world and how the context turns into a generator of meaning, that in many cases has a leading role.

This exhibit, presented in 2023, and facing the irruption of new technologies that go beyond the human capacity, leads us to connect with millenary traditions, rites, shapes, and meanings. This entails at least, a great opportunity to reflect on what the human being is today and how much of the human part is left when we blindly relate to the new tools of our doing.

Juan A. Otamendi Santander