I Have Been to the Mountain – Fausto Amundarain

I Have Been to the Mountain

Fausto Amundarain’s work is rooted in processes deeply connected to collage, comic language, and repetition. His new exhibition at LA BIBI + REUS, titled I Have Been to the Mountain, presents an unpublished body of work that draws lines of continuity between his pictorial and sculptural practice. Both are driven by the same gestures: accumulative processes in which forms encounter and repeat themselves in the studio in contingent ways, as if summoning one another.

They call to each other like echoes, generating a dialectical tension between fullness and emptiness, between volume and the poetic potential of negative space. Far from signifying absence, negative space appears here as latency: it speaks to what is possible. The same is true of seeds. A seed is the ultimate metaphor for what may become, given enough time and care. A kind of habitable dream. In his sculptural series Bird Feeder,

Amundarain mechanically reproduces the image of the almond. While it might seem like a direct reference to the island of Mallorca, where almond trees are abundant, the work traces a more subtle connection between two islands. It was in Sardinia that the artist found in the almond a sculptural object: a closed seed, at once a container and a protective shell. From that encounter, he began to reproduce the almond systematically, repeating it and encapsulating it in wooden structures that recall the storage of a growing harvest.

Also mechanically reproducible. Themes such as the journey, the island, the constant questioning of one’s origins, and the sense of belonging are here linked to the mythical figure of the hero. In classical mythology, as in Greek narratives, the hero’s journey is an insular passage, a voyage from island to island in search of meaning. This ancestral narrative finds its echo in contemporary comics, where the modern hero continues to face challenges, transformations, and unknown territories.

In Fausto’s paintings, recurring symbolic figures appear: the hero, the hands that lead to action, the landscape where everything unfolds, and the mountains as a symbol of hardship to be overcome. In the end, what are islands if not partially submerged mountains? In the same way, Fausto’s work remains partially submerged. It requires slow time for contemplation and deciphering. This allows the viewer to find echoes, the significance of the line, the cross-references, and the mutable topography the artist has constructed as his own language. A shifting geography that takes shape through layers and strata, and that unfolds as a territory to be explored heroically. A journey that invites adventure. To ascend, each one, their own mountains.