“What distinguishes a work of art is the determination of its form. In effect, each choice is perceived (perseveres) as a necessary condition. Experience confirms to us that at a certain point in the process one has the feeling or the confirmation that there is no longer a choice, that decisions are inherent to the work, independent of the initial purpose, of personal taste or of the (applied) rules. When the artist accepts a vicarious role, a mediating role, the artwork gains more solvency because the decision about form usually responds to self-regulatory needs. The (beauty of) nature is unaware of its reason, likewise the inherent form does not (necessarily) ask for the author's consent.

The open work, incomplete by definition, is nowadays our natural way of understanding a work of art; it is, most of the time, an intermediate stage in an unfinished, factually indeterminate, possibly endless process; it is, almost always, an incomplete stage in a process without immediate anchorage. Contemporary art is irremediably fragmentary and partial.”

“The series Who guards his mouth guards his soul (2020-21) consists of small pictorial pieces made on the flyleaves of the unbound covers of encyclopaedias or second-hand books. These covers, which are the recycled remains of those books that I use to make collages, function as "povera" relics turned into improvised media on which I can paint with absolute freedom small diptychs that unfurl like a butterfly’s colourful wings or like the innocuous prints of a Rorschach test; diptychs that are the consequence of unfolding the media and seeing two, theoretically counterposed, images at the same time, two images previously face-to-face in their incommunicable intimacy. Starting from these pairings of Siamese images, it becomes clear that the only aesthetic debate that succeeds is, in the end, the one between what is repeated and what is differentiated.

In this collage-painting the dehumanised fragments – disfigured and reconfigured, deconstructed and reconstructed –, the fragments of the processual anatomy, come to be some sort of mediators that make it possible to reconstruct a possible-individual in the chaotic melting pot of art dehumanisation. And to constitute this painting without a particular referent, to constitute this emotional geography, to formalise this anatomy and this physiognomy, I have no choice but to make use of the self-generation of histological structures, of the knottings and ligatures that weave a fabric, of the surfaces that fold back to create the organs, and of the muscular tensions that delimit the entrance doors and the escape routes.”

“Ungraspable beauty cannot be portrayed. Like purity, it is an ideal. When the enveloping mantle is broken (as the chrysalis is broken) in the joyous or liberating act of the body, nature shows itself in all its rawness. Naked, made into a gaze, stripped of the mantle that proscribes its visibility, beauty loses its virginal character, loses its ideal condition, and becomes the spectacle of a brief fleeting moment, the radiance of an instant, a superficial static electricity. We see, then, that beauty, that the chromatic iridescence of these psyches that appear and disappear in the sinuosity of their fugitive flight as in a winged victory (El paciente insecticida, 2018) or in an angelic good fortune (Psyche, 2020-21), is something temporary, a brevity, a remoteness of being that ends up abandoning us and that can only be remembered or imagined.

Like the entomologist who pierces the rigid body of a butterfly with a pin so that the iridescent pigmentation of its wings can be appreciated, the painter also immobilises the transit of forms in order to find the exact form or the right form, the harmony or the logic. Or, as it has always been called, beauty. The painter stops the flow of the psyche, the desire to be appearance in a pictorial matter that is already forever a fixed image, a death-image. But a death-image of a psyche still acting, of a psyche that seems to have life or to retain it because it is expressive, because it is the replica of a bodily semantics full of life. Painting is a paradoxical activity that reaches its maximum expression when it restores the constituent restlessness of that which has life, be this restlessness a visual thing or a mental thing. Painting will never fail to be a thought of the eyes for the eyes that becomes exemplary, precisely because it gives stability to that which quivers.”

“My way to approach painting, both at a formal and a semantic level, is through superimposed layers of elements’ rhizomes. They expand horizontally and vertically across the painting’s surface. First, I add these exogenous elements and then I rearrange them to see what happens. At the canvas plane, sense nodules communicate with each other until they create a machine of multiple senses. There is not one single sense, but many senses which overlap, replace, complement, contradict, and coordinate each other. One might say my painting is a place of sense creation, more than a place to detail a preconceived idea.

In any case, now my painting should not only be seen in depth, I take space illusion for granted. These last paintings, which are large format, must be seen in their whole horizontal extension as well. Their approach has to do with a painting that unfolds (or unrolls, I think about Japanese screens or Chinese painting in paper rolls). The motif is narrated sequentially on a single plane, that can be as large as needed. And this expanded approach can also be applied to modular pieces.

In that sense, painting takes in a certain temporality. It is a footprint of the occurrence, but a footprint that registers different moments of such occurrence (plastic). I guess that the idea that remains is a reflection of the uncertainty of a being, of a being in a state (of great hope), of a being in transformation. The object which is represented is the fixed photo of a being that is materializing. The painting claims a lineal reading that develops into some kind of loop with neither beginning nor end, which rotates back across itself because the beginning and end coincide. The object depicted, the painted thing, is not yet completed because all these artworks allude to a vague being, precisely because that being is still taking form. The objective of that which breathes is to remain alive the maximum time possible and, meanwhile, to regenerate into new beings that carry its genetic legacy. In that respect, painting, as life, searches for a way to endure as an expressive device, exploring new forms and ways to create (itself). Life is reflected, yes, but only as some kind of inertia.”

Daniel Verbis