Do we make our materials, or do our materials make us? The work of Vicente Baeza raises questions about the interplay between creativity and corporeality, questions about the essence of the creative process in which ideas, feelings, and intuitions are transformed into material forms. In the exhibition I’m useless, he presents a series of new works in which he approaches the surface as a place where actions, materials, and time leave residual traces rather than fixed images. Everything revolves around the process.
Crosses, 2026, is a large work with a horizontal format, wider than human arms can reach. It is made on rubber, a non-porous, flexible, and resistant material. What you see is a rusty, orange-red surface in which eight blue rectangles, each bearing a drawing of overlapping feet, have been cut out. With all its mottled, light-dark color nuances, the orange-red surface resembles a desert landscape, but it could also be a magnification of a reptile’s skin. Baeza began this work by sanding the rubber; he then allowed acrylic paint to flow onto it, followed by solvent dye—a type of dye that is completely soluble in alcohol and creates beads on the surface, causing the acrylic paint to appear to float. Next, he pressed pieces of cardboard onto the surface, turned the rubber over, and did the same on the back as on the front. Wet paint stains on the floor made imprints on the rubber, like the creases of the plastic lying on the floor. The effect of the actions is that the image appears worked and marked by time. The close-ups of intertwined feet were made directly on the rubber with pastel chalk.
In his rubber works, Baeza takes on the challenge of a support that both registers and repels interventions. The rubber can be worked with chisels, cut, sanded, and pressed, whereby gestures are recorded as both physical imprints and visual traces. Paint, dyes, and other substances do not penetrate fully but accumulate, break, and harden into a crust on the surface, creating a layered series of traces, cracks, stains, textures, shadows, and clouds. His works function as registrations of transformation in which color, material, space, and time intersect. Through the confrontation between industrial material and the classical medium of drawing, intuitive impulses and personal ‘rules’ in the process are problematized, resulting in an interesting tension.
Intuition plays an important role and, for Baeza, begins with thinking of something tangible, of materials, from memory or projection. The question of how they would feel and how they would react to certain actions, the idea that they could bring something new, constitutes the challenge. Baeza: “I work quite slowly; what I do is not action painting. My intuition extends a bit longer over time, and in that sense, this influences my process. My intuition is a way of working. I force myself to do something ‘wrong,’ tell myself that I have to mess everything up to really take a risk. What is important for my work is precisely not to want to be in control, to let happen what is not planned: that is where the mystery arises, a revelation.”
The title of the exhibition I’m useless expresses the fundamental concept of risk-taking, and a critical relationship to systems and rules. Baeza: “I hope that it happens materially, from one work to the next. There is a conviction and a belief in getting to know myself through art. The contradiction of having certainties: my body wants to have certainties but my ideology believes in uncertainty, I embody an inner conflict, I learn to get balance and to accept both. I am my own material too, when I talk about my work I am talking about myself. I want to be the involved maker and not the observer. Not an outside subject. I would not say my work is autobiographical, I don’t make a story about myself, it is more metaphysical, I want my work to be my feelings, to be my ideas, I guess it is impossible, but still, it is a bit crazy to say that is me, but that is the approach that I have.”