Juan Astianax

The first memory I have about what is art for me now happened when I was four and sculpted a pterodactyl with plasticine from a book my mother gave me. I remember I chose it because it was simultaneously beautiful and monstrous being that did exist and this nature was what seemed incredible to me. I loved since then that part of nature the man can’t control and the battle of a man against himself when his instincts go over him.
If I should owe someone the pleasure for what is strange and fantastic, that person would be my mother. She used to tell me stories any time I asked for them, she created in her mind those stories at the same time she was telling them to me. Those stories talked about cowboys and Indians, talked about Tarzan fighting with wild animals and surviving with them in the most hostile environments and some other characters as the “Llorona”, a mexican legend about a woman who had lost her children and used to cry for them every night in the form of a ghost.
All this used to generate a series of emotions in me that led me to transform my immediate reality. Once, a teacher told me “you can find the end of something in its beginning” and this adventure started so naturally as if it was a game that I was deeply marked by it, I can’t be different now: everything around me is material to create.
Creating consists of generating new movements and rhythms in the world, reflecting and intervening in its nature to widen the limits the human spirit could have, in this way art is useful to state anything can exist, or be created, or invented, that’s why an artwork can be found (at least potentially) in any place, it can have any shape and any position.
I always drew because it was pleasant. At the beginning, I had fun drawing or forming figures with plasticine. In that time I didn’t have any idea doing those things were related to art, but now I am sure you can’t do art without having fun. Even though, the control in each detail of a work is absolutely necessary due to the fact it is what allows the liberty: that communion among the wish of an artist, his ability to imagine, experimenting and his knowledge of the reality he wants to change. The techniques to do this are invented at the same time art is created.
Then, I began to understand my work as an autobiography where I can put what I live freely, what cares to me is the expressive power of my art pieces as an evidence of life in the sense of discovering of it and its enjoyment.
Definitively, I believed in art as something infinite and I believed so because I recognize I am, myself a being for whom the limits of creation are just problems emerging when I stop listening my own wishes during my incessant interest about changing everything and doing everything moves.