The Salamander

In 2023, the Stories began in Prague, with Bohemian crystal trays and antique figurines from a city that held a thread of my family history. In Barcelona, the series finds its next territory. The Encants, the city's old flea market, has become for me what the Prague antique stalls were then: a place where the discarded waits to be read again.

This piece begins with a thick rubber salamander, red with black spots, found among the figurines at the Encants. Beside it, a sheet of cardboard, 48 × 65 cm, that had once carried advertising. It has been printed, used, set aside. The contrast between the two materials interested me: industrial cardboard and a child's toy, both pulled out of their first lives.

I prepared the cardboard with several layers of transparent lacquer until it had the body to hold what came next. Then I worked the surface with red and black inks, the same two colours the salamander wears, letting the pigments find their own forms across the prepared ground. Over this, I poured a layer of epoxy resin tinted with green iridescent mica pigment. The resin pools, catches the light, shifts as the viewer moves. Three different surfaces, three different times, held together by the final pour.

The salamander has been read by many cultures as the creature that walks through fire and is not consumed. Alchemists drew it at the centre of their treatises as a sign of transmutation: the moment when base material becomes something else, when matter is purified by passing through what should destroy it. Here, the small red figure crosses a field of its own colours and arrives at a green iridescent threshold: a fire that does not burn, a passage that leaves a trace rather than ash.

Every object in this work has already lived once. The advertising cardboard, the rubber toy, the inks: each carries a previous use, a previous voice. Layered together under resin, they begin a second life as a single story about transformation, which is the one constant in everything I have made, and in everything I have lived.