Trees, shadows, and metaphors. By Fernando Soler, writer. 2025

Let us speak of “trees” only in the sense that they are the supreme manifestation of vegetal life. Trees have undergone the general process of the “thinning of the real” that the other representations in your painting have also suffered: from the great panorama of skyscrapers to the small crack in the wall. From the tree to the leaf on the ground. Thus you have poetically developed a very subtle, intimate dialogue between vegetation and cement, in which shadows, reflections, and traces gradually replace the things themselves.

It is not that the human presence is missing (that would be impossible: a painting is, at the very least, the trace of the hand that painted it), but that man appears in the form of graffiti or the muddy mark of a wheel wet from a puddle.

Let us examine the poetic mechanisms with which you have carried out this “thinning” in the case of the tree. How can there be “less tree” in a painting? Well, for instance, by painting only a fragment, a branch, or the base of the trunk. But also by scattering its leaves on the ground. If you recall “metonymy,” the idea of the part standing for the whole, as long as there is a leaf, the tree is still there. And can the tree be diminished even further? Of course—through its shadow. But the shadow of the tree is no longer a part of it; it is an analogical projection painted by light on walls and floors, something more immaterial, in the sense that I can keep a dry leaf in my pocket, but not the shadow of a palm tree. This second procedure is called “metaphor.” Shadows are metaphors of things, based on a relation of analogy that can even deceive us: Is that a tree or its shadow?

In the reflections of water on the streets you find another way of attenuating the real. If puddles were docile, clean, and gleaming mirrors, they would merely duplicate the emerged world, but the water of the streets reflects a reality that is muddied, confused, distorted, where the limits of things are not always clear and images become mixed. What lies beneath a puddle, the world of water, is another reality—a broth of liquid, sinuous, imprecise forms—a vast metaphor of that other world of air, much more rigid and delimited, where we breathe.

There is a third, most important resource in your paintings. We can call it “trace,” but in the very broad sense of “a mark of presence.” It is the trace of a tire, but also the stains of rust or dampness, dirt, graffiti—in short, the signs of time upon things. Time is an important theme in your painting.

If you were to write, you would not be a novelist nor a playwright, but a poet. Your painting is created from the logic of poetry: it is that sky in the puddles, an essentialized reality, a gentle cry that rejects the excesses of ugliness in all its forms.