I Have Been to the Mountain

“Stone speaks first — you reach, unsure whether to climb, hold on, or simply survive. Fear wears many faces; some you flee, others you become. The summit awaits without promise — treasure, beast, or sky, you carry them all.”

Fausto Amundarain’s practice is deeply rooted in processes of collage, comic language, and repetition. His new exhibition at La Bibi + Reus, I Have Been to the Mountain, introduces an entirely new body of work that forges connections between his pictorial and sculptural explorations. Both stem from the same core gestures: accumulative processes in which forms meet and recur in the studio through contingent encounters, as if summoning one another. They call out like echoes, creating a dialectical tension between fullness and void, volume and the poetic potential of negative space.

Here, negative space does not imply absence — it becomes latency, a space charged with possibility. The same can be said of seeds. A seed is the ultimate metaphor for what may come to be, given time and care. A kind of habitable dream. In his sculptural series Bird Feeder, Amundarain mechanically reproduces the image of an almond. While the almond may seem an allusion to the island of Mallorca, where almond trees abound, the work actually traces a subtler link between two islands. It was in Sardinia that the artist first encountered the almond as a sculptural object: a closed seed, simultaneously a vessel and a shell. From that moment, he began to replicate it systematically, enclosing it in wooden structures that evoke the storage of a growing harvest — also mechanically reproducible.

Themes such as the journey, the island, the persistent questioning of origin, and the search for belonging resonate here with the mythical figure of the hero. In classical mythology, particularly Greek epic, the hero’s path is often an island-hopping odyssey in search of meaning. This ancient narrative finds its echo in the modern comic, where the contemporary hero still faces trials, transformations, and unfamiliar terrains. In Amundarain’s paintings, recurring symbolic figures appear: the hero, the hands that initiate action, the landscape as stage, and the mountains — symbols of hardship and ascension.

In the end, what are islands if not partially submerged mountains? In the same way, Fausto’s work remains partially submerged. It calls for a slowed gaze, one that contemplates and deciphers. This space of deceleration allows the viewer to perceive echoes, the significance of line, symbolic layering, and the mutable topography the artist has cultivated as his own visual language. A shifting geography composed of layers and strata — a territory to be heroically explored. A journey that beckons adventure. A call to ascend, each of us, our own mountains.