Statement
My work moves between painting and xylography. I paint and carve images in bas-relief onto wooden surfaces. As an Expressionist, I am interested in the imprint as a living form between perception and meaning, creating an image that is simultaneously not an image—existing in the moment before recognition and naming, and opening a liminal space where time can be touched.
Through the uniqueness of carved wood, a non-reproducible matrix of time emerges. It carries within both the origin and the passing of time. By carving and painting, I add my own traces to those already present in the material. Chance and intention thus enter into dialogue as two interconnected forms of mark-making. Working in close dialogue with nature, I explore the relationship between painting, printmaking, and materiality. The grain, textures, and marks of the wood carry traces of growth, transformation, and memory, becoming an integral part of the image.
The wood chips produced during the carving process, which I remove from the material using metal chisels, are later reinserted into the work. The creative process thus becomes visible as a suspended moment, while the material itself becomes a carrier of memory. I am interested in what remains in motion, in what is unfinished and unrepeatable, touched by the passing of time.
Wood allows me to explore time not only by making it visible, but also by making it physically perceptible. I invite the viewer to touch the wood and move around the work. Only through this bodily and haptic engagement does the image become fully experienced in its materiality and complete itself. The relief technique I have developed therefore requires an active, multisensory form of perception.
My current artistic technique began in 2019, when I left Argentina for an artistic journey through Europe. In London, I discovered old wooden crates for Argentine wine in a basement. Without hesitation, I took the wooden lids with me to work on them throughout my journey. This practice unexpectedly developed a force of its own. When I arrived in Germany in the eleventh month of my journey and was unable to return to Argentina due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to remain in Berlin and observe where this new technique would lead me.
Over the past six years, this work has developed into an independent artistic practice through which I explore questions of the image, identity, memory, technical reproducibility, the symbol, time, cultural belonging, and migration. Out of these investigations and biographical experiences, my practice has developed into an artistic research in which wood is not merely a support for my work, but a portrait of the active material holding existence together.
My images therefore do not emerge as fixed representations, but as thresholds where contrasting forces coexist and continuously transform one another. Presence and absence, permanence and change co-produce form and meaning, opening a threshold toward what persists between binary conditions. Through this process, I seek to make visible the fragile and ever-changing nature of our perception of life.
Zeit
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Holz
Fine arts by Mx Watson
CONTACT MX WATSON