Artist Statement

Born in Ecuador, Nicolás Aguirre has been living in France since 2010. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier, he develops a transdisciplinary practice combining sculpture, drawing, and installation. His work explores notions of soul, ritual, and transformation, intertwining Andean cosmologies, contemporary gestures, and collaborative processes.

In Aguirre’s artistic universe, the soul is not a fixed entity but a presence in motion — elusive, mutable, in constant reconfiguration. It returns as a central motif in his multidisciplinary practice, which merges drawing, installation, sculpture, and painting. Each medium becomes a new territory for the soul to inhabit, a place where it may resonate, fade, or even vanish.

Whether through contracts formalizing the exchange of soul fragments, the construction of contemporary mummies wrapped with ceremonial slowness, or the spectral absence of the body revealed by radiographic images, Aguirre approaches the invisible with a form of ritual caution. These gestures do not seek to unveil or expose the soul, but rather to circle around its traces, to invoke its presence through the marks it leaves behind.

It emerges in the faint shadows of an X-ray, where bones are exposed and carefully rearranged like Andean funerary relics, or in the subtle iterative variations of the series Perpetual Soul Mutation, where each canvas shifts slightly from the previous one — as if catching the soul in the act of escaping. In the hollow of a ceramic vessel or the neon-lit void of a sculptural opening, the soul is not filled but contained. The aim is not to complete it, but to preserve the emptiness in which it resonates.

True to this philosophy, Aguirre develops with each collaborator a ritualized practice of creation. With weavers, carpenters, masons, metal casters, or ceramicists, each exchange gives birth to a new version of his work — never identical, never entirely his own. The gap between the initial drawing and the object that emerges becomes an essential space: a sacred margin where the soul reveals itself once more, shaped not only by the concept but by the hands that bring it into being.

In this space of divergence and translation, ánima reappears. Not as something that can be possessed or defined, but as a movement — the movement of hands circling a mystery, the choreography of making around what can never be fully made.

Text adapted from Ana Rodriguez