I borrow the language of emojis and the universe of the cute: simple, everyday visual codes shared within digital communication. I am drawn to the fact that something so apparently basic can function as a highly complex system of emotional encoding. Emojis are reductions of the face, yet they also operate as contemporary hieroglyphs, condensing and translating communication into increasingly abstract forms.
I work with sweetness as a strategy, as an ambivalent device: an apparent fragility that coexists with a subtle sense of estrangement. As I understand it, the cute functions as a sweet surface covering a more unstable terrain. At the same time, it provides a framework through which I can establish connections between the digital and the vegetal. I see clear analogies between these two realms. Plants, understood as complex and responsive living systems, express forms of sensitivity that we are not trained to perceive. More than 80% of the planet’s living biomass consists of plant life; yet its very omnipresence renders it invisible. A similar dynamic unfolds in the digital sphere: continuous scrolling, no matter how dopamine-driven the images may be, eventually produces a form of perceptual numbing. Abundance leads to saturation; saturation leads to desensitization.
These works operate within that tension. They propose a slowing down of perception, an insistence on looking at what usually goes unnoticed. Above all, they invite us to look at plants.
The formal economy of emojis recalls pre-schematic childhood drawing. This is why these bio-emojis appear with legs: vegetal faces that walk. Unlike animals, plants cannot flee; they remain. This condition of immobility is embedded in the cork oak rounds that serve as support. The support is not neutral. Cork oak is a soft material that requires time to dry and patience to work with. These pieces are remnants of living matter (organic material transformed) yet they also function as code.
Each work operates as a recognizable gesture that, for a brief moment, opens a small fissure in the automatisms of perception.