Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

Echoes in Gel: The Jellied Visions of Henri Velasquez

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Echoes in Gel: The Jellied Visions of Henri Velasquez

By Dr. Soraya Min, Department of Postmaterial Studies, Worcester University for the Handbook of Lesser-Known Artists

Few contemporary artists have so perplexed critics—and delighted bioengineers—as Henri Velasquez (b. 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay). Operating at the intersection of sensory art, and post-anthropocentric aesthetics, Velasquez is best known for pioneering the genre of gelatin-based spatial installation, or what he coined “hydrocolloid sculpture.”

His primary medium? Unflavored, food-grade gelatin—used not as a vehicle for nostalgia or irony, but as a serious, if wobbly, inquiry into memory, decay, and perception.

In a contemporary art world saturated with archival anxiety and digital preservation, Velasquez has built a body of work around impermanence.

Origins: The Viscous Turn

Velasquez began as a classically trained sculptor at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay but quickly grew disenchanted with the fetishization of permanence. After a formative period working in a biochemistry lab (as a janitor, not a technician), he became obsessed with physical states between liquid and solid. He would later describe gelatin as “the metaphysical compromise between ambition and collapse.”

His earliest gelatin works were unsanctioned: slabs of red gelatin cast inside urinals, in subway turnstiles, and—infamously—on the keyboard of a harpsichord thought to have been played by Mozart in Vienna.

These early acts, both anarchic and tender, became known as Los Blandos (“The Softs”), and positioned him as a fringe trickster in Latin American conceptual circles.

Medium: Gelatin as Metaphor and Material

To Velasquez, gelatin is not just a visual medium—it is tactile, sonic, and profoundly temporal. “It sweats. It sighs. It forgets itself,” he wrote in his notes for the GEL™ Symposium (Lisbon, 2012). He is known to cast large-scale works—entire rooms, staircases, chandeliers—out of molded gelatin that visibly degrades throughout the course of an exhibition.

The gelatin is always unflavored, untinted. “Color distracts. Flavors beg. I need my material to behave like fog: present but without demands.”

Temperature is an essential element in his installations. Many are displayed in carefully climate-controlled spaces, while others are deliberately left to melt. Some include audience interaction: visitors must walk barefoot through gelatin fields, sit in soft chairs that deform beneath them, or whisper into congealed microphones that no longer transmit sound.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Memory Is a Tremble” (2014, Reina Sofía, Madrid):

A 9-meter table covered in hundreds of gelatin castings of family heirlooms—tools, dolls, medals—that gradually collapsed over a 3-week period under soft UV lighting.

• “Orthogonal Collapse” (2017, Venice Biennale):

An entire room constructed of gelatin-based bricks, stacked meticulously into classical architectural motifs. On opening day, the ambient heat began to soften the walls, and by the end of the exhibition, the room had partially fallen in on itself.

• “Index of Softness” (2020, MoMA PS1, New York):

Visitors were invited to press their forearms into a wall of warm gelatin and leave imprints that faded over hours. The artist referred to this as a “tactile census of impermanence.”

The Gelation Schism

Velasquez’s practice has not been without its critics—or fractures. In 2019, he was publicly accused by a former assistant, conceptual chef Nadya Lemcke, of “monopolizing the metaphors of softness.” Their collaborative project Edible Echoes (which involved visitors eating gelatin castings of musical instruments) was later disavowed by both parties.

Since then, Velasquez has been more reclusive, but not less ambitious. In 2023, he was reportedly working with a group of structural engineers to build a gelatin tower 100 metres high in the Andes, designed to last exactly one month.

Critical Reception and Legacy

To some, Velasquez is a charlatan—a jester in an apron, stirring nonsense in a bowl. But to others, he is one of the most radically embodied thinkers in contemporary art. His work speaks to ecological fragility, cultural amnesia, and the failure of language in the face of entropy.

His writings, collected in the volume Notes Toward a Theory of Wobble (2021), have been widely cited by theorists of new materialism and posthuman phenomenology.

Art historian Camila Dror described his practice best:

“Velasquez is the only artist I know who takes impermanence seriously, but not solemnly. He invites us to laugh at our own desire to last.”

Final Thoughts: On the Verge of Collapse

As of writing, Henri Velasquez continues to work in a refrigerated studio outside Montevideo. He refuses to preserve any of his sculptures beyond their exhibition dates. “To refrigerate is to deny time,” he told a Spanish interviewer. “Let the jelly die.”

His rumored next project? A symphony for gelatin titled Concerto for Collapse—a performance piece where deep bass frequencies slowly liquefy an orchestra of moulded instruments.

“If marble is how a culture boasts,” Velasquez once said, “gelatin is how it confesses.”

The Whisper Carver: The Sonic Absences of Henri Pagnol

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The Whisper Carver: The Sonic Absences of Henri Pagnol

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

In an age where sound art is often reduced to ambient noise or immersive spectacle, Henri Pagnol (b. 1955, Marseille) has pursued a path so peculiar that even seasoned curators admit they have difficulty explaining it to audiences without provoking laughter.

Pagnol’s chosen medium is whisper erosion—the slow physical wear of objects caused by the repeated act of talking or whispering onto their surfaces. His practice, which spans five decades, is not merely about sound, but about its erosive touch.

Over the years, he has “carved” marble blocks, dulled polished copper, and even altered antique mirrors—not with tools, but with years of murmured breath.

Origins: Silence as a Chisel

The story of Pagnol’s medium begins in 1978 when, as a bored apprentice in a restoration workshop, he leaned close to an ancient limestone frieze and daily recited Rimbaud into it. Months later, he claimed to notice a subtle pitting on the stone surface, which he attributed not to dust or age, but to the soft abrasion of moisture-laden breath.

Convinced he had stumbled onto a form of “sonic sculpture,” Pagnol began methodically whispering into stones, metals, and glass. The work was excruciatingly slow—sometimes requiring years before any visible change occurred.

“I am not carving an object,” he told an early interviewer, “I am persuading it to change.”

Method: The Breath as Tool

Pagnol’s studio looks less like an atelier than a confessional. Objects rest on pedestals at mouth height. A small metronome marks his whispering pace. The artist wears no mask; moisture is essential. His whispered texts are often poems, political manifestos, or strings of nonsense syllables, chosen for the shape they give the lips and the warmth of exhalation.

He considers each project a duet: the object’s molecular resistance versus the persistence of his murmurs. For a large marble piece, he might spend eight hours a day over a decade, slowly coaxing its surface into a new topography.

Notable Works and Exhibitions

• “Le Faible Marteau” (The Weak Hammer), 1989, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris:

A copper plate displayed alongside an audio recording of ten years’ worth of whispered texts that had gradually dulled its mirror finish into a soft matte haze. Visitors could lean close to see faint lip-shaped depressions.

• “La Chambre des Sibilances” (Room of Sibilance), 2003, Venice Biennale:

A darkened chamber containing twenty antique mirrors, each partially clouded by years of whispered recitations of extinct bird names. Attendees reported a “palpable quiet pressure” in the room.

• “Erosion No. 47” (2016, Kyoto Art Center):

A limestone sphere, once perfectly smooth, subtly hollowed on one side after twenty-three years of daily whispering the alphabet in French.

Falling Out: The Whisper Schism

In the mid-2000s, Pagnol became associated with a younger group of “sonic sculptors” who experimented with directed breath and vocal resonance to shape malleable materials. The collaboration, however, collapsed in 2008 after a public dispute in Berlin over whether recorded whispers—played through hidden speakers—could be considered equivalent to live human breath.

Pagnol declared recordings “dead breath” and left the group. “An object will only yield to breath that has crossed the beating heart,” he wrote.

The Living Artifact

Pagnol refuses to sell his works, arguing that their “erosion is unfinished” until he dies. Many institutions host his pieces on indefinite loan, with the condition that the artist must have access to continue whispering into them. The Louvre reportedly employs a dedicated staffer to unlock a gallery after hours for his murmured maintenance sessions.

His works are not fixed; they are mid-transformation, as if perpetually listening. This presents museums with a curatorial paradox: the objects degrade over time, yet their value lies in that degradation.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Some critics dismiss Pagnol as a performance artist indulging in pseudo-science; others regard him as one of the purest material poets of his generation. The late curator Sophie Daumas famously said, “Pagnol doesn’t sculpt objects—he sculpts patience.”

Younger conceptualists exploring “slow art” and “imperceptible change” often cite him as a pioneer. Philosophers of material culture have drawn parallels between his work and glacial erosion, coral growth, and even political change through persistent dissent.

Final Thoughts: The Whisper as Monument

Now in his seventies, Pagnol continues to work in a small, humid studio in Marseille. He is rumored to be undertaking his most ambitious project yet: whispering into a block of Carrara marble for the remainder of his life, intending it to be displayed only posthumously.

In a rare 2024 interview, when asked if he feared the work might never be “finished,” he smiled and replied:

“The whisper is never finished. The marble is only pretending to resist.”

From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

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From Ink to Insect: The Art of Silvio Neris and the Termite Manuscripts

By Dr. Anika Scholz, Professor of Art Theory for the Handbook of Lesser Known Artists

In an age saturated by digital replication and hyper-visible authorship, Silvio Neris (b. 1961, Ferrara, Italy) offers a profoundly unsettling counterpoint: artworks that eat themselves.

Best known for his decades-long project, Codex Termitaria, Neris created works in a medium so strange it was initially dismissed as grotesque gimmickry: termite-generated manuscript destruction. In other words, he invited colonies of termites to “edit,” sculpt, and gradually consume handwritten texts of his own composition—treating insects not merely as metaphors, but as collaborators.

The result? A body of work that exists in perpetual erasure—art as a pact between creation and disappearance, authored by both man and insect.

Origins: The Lexicon of Devouring

Silvio Neris trained first as a calligrapher in Bologna before earning a degree in comparative theology. He was obsessed from a young age with medieval manuscripts, particularly palimpsests—texts overwritten, scraped away, fragmented. “The absence of language was more potent than the words themselves,” he wrote in his early notebook Lacrima Scripturae (1982).

But it wasn’t until a fateful trip to Surinam in 1991 that Neris encountered the Nasutitermes genus of termites—wood- and paper-consuming insects that would become the medium of his life’s work.

Rather than preserving ancient documents, Neris began to create manuscripts for destruction—dense, ornate calligraphic texts inked with a homemade blend of linseed oil and honey, designed specifically to lure termites.

The Termite Manuscripts: Method and Meaning

Neris’s process was both scientific and ritualistic. First, he composed philosophical, spiritual, or artistic treatises in meticulous calligraphy—never typing, never scanning. He would then encase the manuscripts in glass-walled termite enclosures, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years. Over time, the insects would carve tunnels through the pages, eroding text, reconfiguring syntax, and leaving behind abstract voids, natural glyphs, or complete annihilation.

These works were not preserved as static objects. Rather, Neris documented them only occasionally with high-resolution scans—once before exposure to the termites, once after, and often, not at all. “What matters is the gesture of surrender,” he insisted in a rare interview. “The artist must relinquish final authorship.”

Select pieces, like Fragmentum XIII (on the death of snow), feature pages half-eaten, with fragments of Latin drifting through the ruined paragraphs. Others, like Codex Nullus, exist now only as a title—completely consumed.

Exhibitions: Devouring the Viewer

His 2004 solo show at the Fondazione Prada, Mandibles of Life, was a turning point. The centerpiece, a 32-page theological tract on silence, was presented mid-consumption. Viewers witnessed the insects slowly erasing the text over the course of the exhibition.

Some critics were repulsed; others awed. Philosopher Claire Badiou attended and later wrote: “Neris creates a theology of absence through the appetite of lesser beings. It is the most honest eschatology I have seen.”

The artist’s refusal to frame the termite as “metaphor” infuriated many. “They are not symbols,” he insisted. “They are editors.”

Subsequent exhibitions in Berlin, Kyoto, and São Paulo emphasized performative decay. The installations featured ambient microphones picking up the faint crackle of termite mandibles, giving voice to the act of artistic destruction.

Collapse and Withdrawal

In 2015, Neris staged what was billed as his final work: Index Moriturae, a library of 108 handwritten books, locked in wooden cabinets seeded with termites. Each cabinet was sealed, never to be opened. The titles were announced publicly, but the contents were to remain unseen until fully devoured.

This act—part disappearance, part protest—was in response to what he called “the ruinous hunger of the market for permanence.”

Afterward, he withdrew from public life. Rumours persist that he continues his work in a monastery outside Mantua, feeding insects with inked meditations on impermanence.

Critical Legacy: Anti-Archival Aesthetics

Silvio Neris’s practice—situated at the cross-section of environmental art, performance, manuscript culture, and speculative theology—resists easy categorization. Is it destruction or collaboration? Sculpture or language? Is the termite a tool or a co-creator?

What’s clear is that Neris expanded the role of the artist into domains of inter-species authorship, consumptive aesthetics, and radical anti-preservation. In an era obsessed with metadata, permanence, and visibility, he dared to make work that refused all three.

His influence is beginning to show. Recent “bio-degenerative” artists, like Lena Xu and the Spore Collective, have cited Neris as a key inspiration. So too have post-human theorists and ecocritical philosophers. His few interviews are now taught in MFA courses as primary texts on aesthetic self-erasure.

It is only right to give Neris the last word. He made a fitting comment in 1998. “The greatest beauty,” he said, “is what you made knowing it would not last.”

Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

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Great Artists: Marcellus Vire

The Salt of Memory: The Enduring Tear Art of Marcellus Vire

In a century increasingly obsessed with speed, spectacle, and permanence, the work of Marcellus Vire (b. 1938) offers a quiet, almost monastic rebuttal. For over six decades, the Franco-Italian conceptual artist has worked with a medium that is both profoundly human and radically ephemeral: tears. Through this most personal of substances, Vire has constructed an oeuvre that merges performance, ritual, alchemical experimentation, and emotional endurance.

Today, at 87, Vire remains an elusive but revered figure in the international art world—an artist who has turned grief, memory, and truth into his palette. His influence spans from relational aesthetics to contemporary performance art, yet his practice remains uniquely his own: intimate, uncommodifiable, and fundamentally unphotographable.

Beginnings: Mourning as Material

Born Marcello Virenzi in Turin in 1938, Vire’s formative years were shaped by postwar scarcity and private tragedy. His twin brother, Luca, died at age seven in a drowning accident—a trauma Vire has cited as his “first and most persistent wound.” Raised in a devout Catholic household, Vire was exposed early to ritual, lamentation, and the idea of bodily sacrifice as symbolic communication.

Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in the late 1950s, Vire quickly abandoned conventional media. “Clay forgets nothing,” he once wrote, “but tears forget everything—and still leave behind salt.” His first recorded experiment with tears as a medium occurred in 1961, when he captured a single drop on untreated linen, creating what he called a “transparent wound.”

Method and Medium: Tears as Language

Vire’s process is both conceptual and bodily. His tears are induced through a range of practices: sustained memory recall, recitation of poetry, exposure to certain scents (especially bergamot and violet, which he associates with his great-grand-mother), and long periods of silence. Once shed, the tears are captured—on paper, linen, or blown glass—and documented with meticulous care.

Over time, he developed what he terms a “taxonomy of grief,” in which tears are categorized by emotional origin: sorrow, joy, frustration, mourning, and release. His seminal Cartographies Salées series (1982–1995) consisted of over 200 small panels, each stained with a single teardrop and inscribed with the memory that provoked it. The works were displayed in dim, humidity-controlled rooms, the salt traces visible only from certain angles.

Rather than treating the tear as a symbolic gesture, Vire regards it as a material index of interior experience. His practice draws from both Catholic relic tradition and Eastern notions of impermanence. In this sense, his work is more alchemical than performative, concerned less with visibility than with transmutation.

The Ethics of Witnessing

Though often labeled a performance artist, Vire resists theatricality. His “weeping sessions”—held privately or with a small audience—are slow, meditative events in which silence is essential. He weeps, collects, documents. The audience, if present, is instructed not to intervene, applaud, or speak.

Critics have at times accused him of fetishizing suffering or emotional exhibitionism. Vire is unbothered. “I do not cry for them,” he told philosopher Claire Guérin in a rare 2014 interview. “I cry with them—though they may not yet know it.” In this framing, his work becomes less self-revelation and more radical empathy.

Contemporary Relevance and Late Recognition

For most of the 20th century, Vire’s refusal to commercialize his work—he has never allowed a tear-based piece to be sold—rendered him marginal to the market-driven art world. However, with the rise of affect theory, trauma studies, and post-materialist aesthetics, his work has come under renewed scholarly and curatorial interest.

In 2018, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris mounted Les Larmes du Temps, a landmark retrospective of Vire’s output from 1961 to the present. The show included reconstructed weeping sessions, vitrines of tear-stained cloths, and audio diaries recorded during grief rituals. A companion symposium brought together scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, and art theory to discuss his legacy.

Most recently, in 2024, Vire collaborated with olfactory artist Lien Zhang on Eaux Perdues, a scent-based installation in Marseille evoking the emotional conditions under which tears are produced. The installation featured a climate-controlled chamber where humidity, smell, and silence coalesced into an invisible portrait of mourning.

Philosophy of the Invisible

Vire’s ongoing notebooks, Notules sur la douleur, now spanning more than 20 volumes, contain aphorisms, chemical notes, and philosophical meditations on the ethics of sadness. A typical entry:

“Tears are not weakness. They are salt seeking form.”

He has never taught formally, never operated a studio, and declines most interviews. Yet he has quietly mentored a generation of affective and performance artists, including Maya Orellana, André Lutz, and the collective Corps Flottants, who credit him with opening emotional labor as a legitimate artistic site.

Final Thoughts: The Art of Evaporation

Now living in quiet seclusion near Avignon, Vire continues to practice daily. His most recent project, Prière de Disparaître (2025–), is a series of salt-dried tear medallions embedded in limestone and returned to the sea—“so that what was felt returns to what cannot be seen.”

In an era of ever-expanding digital visibility and emotional commodification, Vire’s work offers something rare: a poetics of feeling that resists spectacle. He does not document pain. He distills it. And in the process, he teaches us that even the most fleeting gesture—a tear—can be shaped into something enduring.

A Grammar of Grief: The Art of Elias Favière and the Alchemy of Tears

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By Julien Rochefort, Ph.D. for the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

Department of Contemporary Aesthetics, École Normale Supérieure

In the kaleidoscopic history of art, there emerge now and then figures so singular in vision, so hermetically devoted to their personal lexicon of materials, that they appear to exist outside of chronology altogether. Such is the case with Elias Favière (b. 1947), the French-Swiss conceptual artist whose sole medium for over half a century has been human tears—his own and, in carefully arranged collaborations, those of others. In the taxonomy of material-based art practices, Favière’s body of work occupies a rarefied position: ephemeral yet empirical, intimate yet political, aesthetic yet affective.

To engage with Favière’s corpus is to enter a visual tradition that eschews spectacle in favour of sensation; that devalues permanence in favour of presence; that views the tear not merely as evidence of emotion, but as a physical residue of interiority, a distilled articulation of the ineffable. His work belongs less to the realm of painting or sculpture than to what we might call ritualized affective epistemology.

Origins: An Artist of Loss and Distillation

Favière was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1947, to a librarian mother and a father who ran a small observatory. He was raised in silence, or close to it—his mother lost her voice after a traumatic incident in her youth, communicating through a system of written notes and glances. Favière has described his childhood as “an apprenticeship in the art of noticing.” He learned, early, that emotion did not need sound to register.

Trained in the 1960s at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was initially involved with the Support/Surface group but quickly diverged, claiming they were “too attached to canvas, too afraid of the invisible.” His first mature works, collectively titled Larmes isolées (1969–1972), were sheets of blotting paper stained with his own tears, arranged in grids and annotated with date, mood, and ambient temperature. Critics dismissed them as adolescent sentimentality. But philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy would later call these early works “a cartography of vulnerability.”

Method: Weeping as Aesthetic Labor

Favière developed a method for harvesting his tears that bordered on monastic. He constructed a ritual space in his Geneva atelier—a soundproof room with dim lighting and a worn armchair—where he would sit for hours recalling painful memories, sometimes inducing tears through poetry or recordings of loved ones’ voices. The tears were gathered with glass pipettes, then dropped onto linen, paper, glass, or even stone.

A second phase of his career, beginning in the 1980s, involved collaborative weeping: performances in which visitors were asked to recall the last time they cried, and then guided, sometimes wordlessly, into emotional release. The collected tears—always voluntarily given—were recorded, catalogued, and stored in glass ampoules, labeled with initials and date.

Favière insists that he does not seek to manipulate or exploit emotion. “A tear,” he wrote in his 1987 manifesto Les Salines de l’Âme, “is not a confession. It is a mineral event that occurs when the soul exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it.”

Reception: From Margins to Canon

For decades, Favière remained at the periphery of the European art world. His refusal to sell tear-based works—he regarded commodifying them as “profane”—meant that his exhibitions often consisted of empty vessels, faded stains, or atmospheric installations. One early critic called him “the artist of absence.” Another, more charitably, wrote: “He paints with salt and memory.”

It was not until the early 2000s, when interest in affect theory, embodiment, and ephemeral media gained critical traction, that Favière’s practice was reappraised. A landmark retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, Sel et Silence, repositioned him not as a marginal eccentric but as a proto-conceptualist whose use of the body as archive anticipated later movements.

In 2015, the Fondation Repanu devoted a major show to his collaborative series Lacrymographies, in which tear-stained surfaces were scanned at ultra-high resolution and displayed alongside the narratives of the weepers. The show was lauded as “a museum of inner weather.”

Metaphysics of the Tear

What does it mean to make art from tears? For Favière, the answer is not purely metaphorical. The tear, as he understands it, is not a signifier of pain, but an alchemical precipitate of truth. Just as medieval alchemists sought to purify base matter into gold, Favière regards the act of weeping as the transmutation of inner complexity into visible clarity.

There is also an ethical dimension. In an age of surveillance, oversharing, and curated online grief, Favière’s work asks: What is the value of feeling when it cannot be commodified? How can one preserve dignity in the midst of emotional exposure?

His later works take this further. In Osmose (2021), he constructed a room filled with mist formed from evaporated tears collected over three decades. Visitors reported feeling a sensation of “shared sorrow.” Others wept spontaneously. It was unclear whether the art caused tears or the tears became the art.

Legacy and Present Practice

Now in his late 70s, Favière continues to work in near anonymity. He has refused all offers to digitize or NFT his tear works, calling the idea “a tragicomic misunderstanding of presence.” He lives between Geneva and a small village in Ardèche, maintaining what he calls a “liquid archive” of over 4,000 labeled vials of tears—his and others.

He has never taken on students, but his influence is evident in the work of many younger artists exploring the aesthetics of fragility, ritual, and embodied emotion. In a recent interview (his first in over a decade), he remarked: “The history of painting is a history of surfaces. I wanted to know what would happen if we painted with what lies beneath.”

Final Words: Salt as Substance, Not Symbol

Elias Favière’s work may not yet fill auction houses or dominate museum gift shops. It resists replication. It resists permanence. It may, ultimately, resist even history itself.

And yet, his tears endure—not in their physical form, which inevitably evaporates, but in their conceptual potency. They mark a quiet, radical proposition: that the body’s most humble fluid might serve as a medium not for artifice, but for truth.

“I do not cry to be seen,” he wrote. “I cry to remember that I am still capable of feeling.”

From the upcoming Handbook of Lesser-known Artists

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To be published by Pimlico Wilde Publishing, the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists tells the stories of those less well-known artists who have not been favoured by the media coverage given to their contemporaries.

The Obscure Legacy of Aurelia Mendez: The Artist Who Painted with Mould

Art history, while vast, has always held blind spots for the unconventional. One such overlooked figure is Aurelia Mendez (1911–1984), a Spanish-born artist who abandoned pigment, ink, and charcoal in favor of a medium as unpredictable as it was reviled: living mould. At the height of mid-century modernism, when the art world clamored for purity of form and surface, Mendez quietly cultivated growth and decay on her canvases, transforming microscopic life into macroscopic beauty.

The Unlikely Origins

Born in Salamanca to a family of apothecaries, Mendez developed an early fascination with the invisible. Her father’s herbal remedies and glass jars of spores and tinctures became her first teachers in the properties of organic matter. “Colour,” she once said, “is already in the earth; we only need to coax it forth.” After studying chemistry briefly at the University of Madrid, she transferred to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where she was trained in traditional painting.

By the late 1930s, Mendez had begun experimenting with biological growth on untreated linen, placing damp cloths in shallow wooden boxes and introducing selected spores. She nurtured the organisms with carefully measured light, temperature, and humidity, “painting” through conditions rather than direct mark-making. What emerged were lush, variegated spreads of green, yellow, black, and deep crimson, blooming into organic compositions that changed daily as the mould matured.

Scandal and Obscurity

When Mendez exhibited her first series, El Jardín Silencioso (“The Silent Garden”), in Madrid in 1941, the reaction was immediate and violent. Many viewers recoiled at the smell and the suggestion of contamination. Several works were confiscated by local health authorities. Critics dismissed her practice as “perverse,” and her refusal to sterilize or stabilize the pieces doomed them to literal decomposition.

Yet among a small circle of avant-garde thinkers, Mendez’s work was recognized as revolutionary. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a family acquaintance, praised her for “making visible what we pretend not to see: the soft empire of decay that rules all things.” But his support could not shield her from the conservatism of Franco-era Spain, where her work was viewed as a political affront. She relocated to Lisbon in 1946, working in obscurity while continuing her experiments.

Technique and Philosophy

Mendez believed that art should embody the same mortality as its creator. She refused to use preservatives, accepting that her works would eventually consume themselves. Each piece was a collaboration between human intention and microbial agency, with results that could never be fully predicted. Her notebooks from the 1950s detail hundreds of “recipes,” from cultivating Penicillium for icy blue blooms to introducing strains of Aspergillus for velvety blacks.

She often described her practice in agricultural terms. “I plant my canvas,” she wrote, “and I must accept whatever harvest comes.” The process could take weeks or months, with some compositions collapsing into slime before they could be exhibited.

Rediscovery and Legacy

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when the conceptual art movement had softened the art world’s resistance to ephemeral and nontraditional media, that Mendez gained belated recognition. A 1979 retrospective in Paris, The Living Canvas, shocked and fascinated critics, even though half the works were already in various states of decomposition. She died five years later, largely unaware of the influence her ideas would exert on bio-artists of the 21st century.

Today, Mendez is regarded as a precursor to the likes of Anicka Yi and Eduardo Kac, who integrate living systems into art. Very few of her works survive, and those that do are maintained in sterile laboratory conditions, frozen in mid-bloom. Museums struggle with the paradox of exhibiting art that was never meant to last, but Mendez’s words resonate as a rejoinder: “To preserve my work is to betray it. It was born to disappear.”