Keep It Simple (An Ethic of Maintenance) (2023)

Concertina book

Open: 24.5cm x 176cm (9.6″ x 69.2″), Closed: 24.5cm x 18.7cm (9.6″ x 7.3″)

Materials Colour pencils on 250gsm paper, board covers

Keep It Simple (An Ethic of Maintenance) is a visual meditation on care as practice. The work offers a quiet resistance to speed, productivity, and spectacle. It documents a period of isolation, during which daily walks through some of the city’s natural expanses became a vital form of connection to the living world.

Rendered in CMYK colored pencils, the artificial hues, particularly the repeated use of Avatar-blue in the figure, introduce a gentle fictionality. The blue body suggests estrangement, a kind of otherness, alien but present in the everyday. Living as an immigrant in Spain, the use of color becomes both a distancing mechanism and a way to make space for new belonging. The stylization allows for a kind of emotional universality, where individual gestures (spraying pot plants, a foot resting on a desk, reading, a table fan) can be anyone’s.

Drawing as a way of figuring out what to look at and how to see is a form of root-taking in a place and a practice. This personal visual language, this rhythm of line and colour, mirrors a broader search for a sense of place. Hands recur: turning, holding, making. Through them, we enact a quiet ethic of maintenance, a daily rehearsal of attention, an aesthetic of survival.

The title draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of the care of the self: the book is a document of this sustained relation to one’s own body, its habits and surroundings. Here, care manifests in drawing, walking, noticing. In repetition and presence.

Text on reverse reads: It turned into a piece about self-care and the healing power of nature and caring for what’s around you. Noticing what’s close to you, the plants, books, the view from your window, my window, and although I don’t have plants, I am close to nature and my walks in Casa de Campo along the river, to there, and in the other direction, to Parque Lineal, those walks and those hours in nature have been reliable companions over the past few years, especially the last three of living in this flat. These years of very few people close to me, and art, too, has been a major part of self-care: creating, making, learning how to draw, how to see, how to coordinate the connection between my eyes and my hands. The hands are important here, the hands that hold, that nurture, that turn the pages, that write these words.