The word ruin evokes a certain poetic rhetoric and at the same time, it is a term that technically and plainly refers to a demolition, to a set of materials, generally of constructive origin, that have fallen into disrepair. Can both things be combined? Can a material be ruined by an artist, or can the author himself be able to rescue a completely discarded material and turn it into sculpture? All that comes to mind are affirmative answers in the case of Pablo Capitán. Art and ruin are two terms that have been associated for a long time, and we can date this binomial to the key moment in the emergence of romanticism. And we can also say this happy alliance persists in contemporary art thanks to artists like Capitán.

Those of us who are fans of materials and highly value the artists who treat and re-treat them with fairness, often wonder about their memory. These materials have lived a life, often an extreme one, and have had experiences of all kinds. Now, they are tamed once again. This last time, not for a practical purpose, but for aesthetic reasons, seeking to squeeze out their last gasps, or with the intention of giving them a new mission. What is Captain looking for in the materials, in the objects? Its past, its trace, the signs of previous lives? Is he trying to redeem them in his studio, creating with all his affection a new being, as Dr. Frankenstein did?

Capitán pursues these investigations by stepping into unfamiliar, unknown territories, located in another material dimension, territories that contain infinite possibilities, as many as a journey through outer space, as many as a fiction that oscillates between the certain and the unexplored territory, which is the one that interests him the most. And this leads us to matter as an element equivalent to time, which stretches, accelerates, and changes when subjected to certain operations that allow humans to play at manipulating it.

The work of this sculptural magician, Pablo Capitán del Río, oscillates between trompe-l’oeil and paroxysm. To trust in matter is the motive and cause of being a sculptor. Abducted by materials, textures, their scale, weight, and their reactions to contractions and deformations, to wear from use, Capitán is interested in working on the reconstruction of the lost memories of objects, in time and space. All together. In his studio. He enjoys matter and the possibility it holds to be molded, the magic it contains, being a physical and metaphysical element. Capitán is a sculptor who operates in cycles that seem to accelerate geological time, working in a space that gives a magical value to materials. To them, already transformed into objects. To his thoughts. And moreover, to studying how they communicate.

But enough with materiality, because the immaterial is also very present here. It pulses in every intervention by Capitán. Between the material and the immaterial, a fictive space is created where what has been lived and what is yet to come coexist, where any separation between functionality and new artistic destinations dissolves. Where proven physics and science fiction intersect. This is the territory of exploration for Capitán del Río.

Regarding the way the artist approaches materials, he answers this question by himself: it is a very mysterious subject, he tells us. We go to the studio to learn things from the materials, says Capitán. When it comes to executing the sculptural intervention, decisions are made to make things visible or invisible, to include or exclude. Do these decisions obey policies of memory? Is this memory capable of leaving a physical, material trace? Are there a series of specters—ghosts, images—as memories? And if the final creative function consisted not in seeking the disappearance of the model to be represented, but in bringing it closer to a new invisibility, until the material becomes an autonomous presence, with its own life, detached from the original model?

Collapse and redemption of the material object

The world is made of evolving matter, whose temporal patterns oscillate between geological time—meaning the slow pace, the making over millions of centuries —and the forced event, an accident, a spontaneous rupture. We must acknowledge the collapse, the perishability of materials. And their revival as well, the artist tells us.

For a long time now, sculpture has not been a strict, circumscribed expressive field, but rather a “contagion zone” with infinite possibility to expand its spectrum. Without ceasing to mark its own territory, Capitán speaks through his work of a total play of materials, a production process that is at the same time a stage, a collection of material events, a paroxysm of the object. His way of working does not involve a final search, a full sculptural resolution, but rather a resource, a work in progress that extends into the exhibition, into the subsequent life of the piece outside the studio. One must take risks with materials, as Capitán says. One must be both an ally and an enemy of time, as the devil says. If failure has to be seen, let it be seen. And if imperfections need to be highlighted, they are welcome in the “final result,” which is part of that creative tension, that objectual paroxysm.

Because Capitán fully trusts the credibility of objects. There is a “projection” within the work, seeking closeness to that object, to that material with which he lives for a long time in the studio. And while one manipulates the precious materials, they also come to own the artist, and this is how Capitán feels, in an indissoluble creative fusion between him and the tangible part of the piece.

As a creative goal, the works will have an uncertain duration. They are “in transit” objects, which may not be created to last for eternity. One thing Capitán is clear about is avoiding that linear, logical, and sensible narrative of beginning, plot, and conclusion. He is not interested in this. His work is a process of logical and illogical shortcuts, a narrative that breaks, closes, and returns to itself. Where the incongruent, the disaster, the fracture, are welcomed. Where nature and artifice merge.

Pablo, Capitán del Río, explorer of the materials that make up contemporary ruins, ventures forward into the unknown, prowling and experimenting towards dark limits. He delves into the heart of darkness, and although he is afraid, he will not stop, because curiosity is more powerful than caution. Always seeking the origin of matter and the object, investigating what was primordial, its sources, in order to intentionally deform them, to force their redemption.

In this exhibition, Capitán has extended his usual research in and with materials, expanding into the field of nature and, in particular, exploring the concept of the jungle. A jungle in which he feels uncomfortable yet at ease. Disrupting biological roles, the artist shapes the plants, transforming them into static sculptural objects, halting their herbaceous journey through industrial processes. What once had a life now has a very different one, one that stops the decline of the green, in that fascination the artist maintains for the induced disaster. And for salvation.

Capitán knows that a powerful language emerges from the object, from things, a language that only the artist can come to understand and interpret in order to make it known to us. The redeemed dispossession, a meaning that coexists with collapse, misery, failure, and at the same time, a result in which these ruined materials are reborn like a phoenix from its ashes, from the hands of Pablo Capitán del Río.

(Text by Virginia Torrente, independent curator)