Injerencias: Seven Days Locked Away to Reconnect with Material

Some decisions are made with your head, while others come from somewhere deeper. Locking myself away for a week in a Madrid gallery, without a phone, without devices, without windows to the outside world, was one of the latter. It wasn’t a whim or a performance designed to make noise. It was a necessity: to turn down the volume of everything else so I could finally hear what the material had to tell me.

This is the origin of Injerencias, the project I developed from March 22 to 28, 2026, at Galería Nueva (Calle Valencia, 17, Madrid), in collaboration with Malvin Gallery, and whose resulting exhibition was on view until April 19.

The Starting Point: Stopping to Create

I have been working with metal for years. Steel has been my companion since my first pieces at the Escuela de Oficios de Albacete back in the late 1980s, and it has been with me at every stage: in the large urban sculptures that traveled Broadway, in the figures raising their hands that filled the plazas of the Barrio de las Letras, in the interventions in Pamplona, in the projects in Albacete. But there comes a point when you need to stop and ask yourself: What would happen if I set aside everything I already know and return to the simplest gesture?

That question gave birth to Injerencias. A deliberately radical proposal: spending a week living inside the exhibition space itself, completely disconnected from the outside world, without a mobile phone or digital distractions, dedicated exclusively to producing the pieces that would later form part of the show.

I wasn’t going to leave. I wasn’t going to talk to anyone. I wasn’t going to know what was happening outside. Just the metal, the tools, time, and me.

Limiting Yourself to Say More

The premise was twofold: isolation and material limitation. All the sculptures would start from the same point: identical steel sheets in their initial state, thanks to the collaboration of Albasistemas, which provided both the material and its processes. From there, each piece would have to carve its way out from the same origin, transforming through direct work, without shortcuts or additional resources.

It sounds restrictive, and it is. But limitation, when sought out, does not bind: it frees. When all the pieces share the same starting point, what distinguishes them is no longer the resources, but the decision, the gesture, the time invested in each one. The material becomes a common territory, and the difference is made by the specific moment in which I work through it.

I wanted to see what happens when a sculptor has only three things: time, material, and themselves.

Living a Week Without Measured Time

The first day was strange. You think you are used to silence, but the silence of the studio in Albacete is very different from the silence of a gallery in the heart of Madrid where you cannot leave. The first sounds you face are your own: breathing, footsteps, the scrape of the tool against the sheet metal.

Without a phone, days lose their usual shape. There are no messages to answer, no afternoon scrolling, no constant feeling of being just one click away from anything else. Time becomes dense, almost physical. The hours are measured by what appears on the sheet metal, not by what the clock shows.

And then something very specific happens: the mental noise subsides. Ideas that had been crouching for a long time begin to emerge, gestures that in normal daily life are covered up by haste. Concentration stops being an effort and becomes the natural state. Living it, I understood what I had already intuited: isolation is not just the absence of people, it is the presence of oneself.

The Dialogue Between Stillness and Gesture

The title, Injerencias, is no coincidence. The entire week was a negotiation between the stillness of the surroundings and the energy of the creative act. Between the still space of the gallery and the sudden movement of bending, cutting, welding, marking. Between what the material brought with it and what I needed to force into it.

Each piece was "injected" into the sheet metal. And the sheet metal, in turn, was injected into me. It is in that friction where the new language appeared.

The resulting works retain a conceptual memory of what I have been doing—the human gesture, presence, verticality—but they open a different, more abstract, more essential stage. Some are arranged on bases, others form sculptural ensembles, others adhere to the wall or hang suspended in space. I wanted the exhibition itself to be a conversation: pieces that call to each other, that share an origin but argue in height, in position, in intensity.

The Opening: The First Breath of the Outside World

On March 28, at 12:00, the doors opened. It was, without exaggeration, one of the strangest and most beautiful moments I have experienced as an artist. People came in and found, at the same time, two things: the finished pieces and the author who had just emerged from confinement. There was no distance between the process and the work. The work still smelled of the process.

That simultaneity—the end of isolation coinciding with the opening of the show—was part of the project from the beginning. I wanted the visitor not to see pieces already digested by time and promotion, but pieces that had just come into existence.

What I Take Away from Injerencias

I emerged with a new series of works, yes. But also with other certainties:

That limitation, far from impoverishing, sharpens. That isolation is not an escape, but a brutally honest tool for observation. That steel, after all these years, still has things to tell me if I am willing to be quiet. And that many times the hardest thing is not to produce, but to stop doing everything else so you can produce.

Injerencias marks the beginning of a new stage in my work, based precisely on those two pillars: material limitation as a method and isolation as a tool for concentration. It will not be the last time I lock myself away. There is still a lot of metal, a lot of silence, and a lot of questions ahead.

"Injerencias" was developed at Galería Nueva (Calle Valencia, 17, Madrid) from March 22 to 28, 2026, with the organization of Malvin Gallery and the material collaboration of Albasistemas. The exhibition was on view until April 19, 2026.