FORMS THAT BREATHE

2026

Forms That Breathe is a long-term artistic research project developed over more than ten years of study and sustained dialogue with the schematic forms of pre-Columbian thought. Rather than a closed series of works, it constitutes an expanding field: each piece operates as a point within an ongoing conversation with form as language, matter as thought, and time as a system of inscription.

The research does not seek to reconstruct or represent original symbolic systems. Instead, it begins from a critical question: how certain formal structures continue to operate once displaced from their ritual contexts, when meaning becomes unstable and form is exposed to new economies of circulation. Within this threshold—between history, form, and contemporaneity—the ancestral does not appear as a closed past, but as an active formal potential.

The works are primarily conceived as three-dimensional digital sculptures designed to operate across multiple platforms environments, metaverses, and interoperable systems. Depending on the project, these forms may or may not materialize in physical supports such as 3D printing or artisanal processes. Materialization is not the destination of the work, but one possibility within a system that privileges the continuity of form beyond a single medium.

+ Masaru

2026

Digital sculpture

Interoperable piece across multiple platforms

Forms That Breathe is situated at the convergence of matter, memory, and respiration. It proposes an ontological investigation into form as a system of embodied thought. In dialogue with pre-Columbian objects and sculptures, a persistent question emerges: what remains in forms once their ritual context has been lost?

This inquiry resonates with the research of Luz Helena Ballestas Rincón, whose studies on schematic forms in Colombian pre-Columbian design demonstrate that Indigenous graphics cannot be reduced to ornament, but rather constitute a structured system of formal and conceptual relations, shaped by processes of displacement and resignification.

From this historical fracture, the project advances a central hypothesis: what survives is not only matter, but a formal language that continues to organize perception and produce world, even as territories, supports, and technologies change. Following Miguel Triana and Antonio Grass, these forms are understood as generative systems—minimal structures capable of producing infinite variation.

+ GRASS

2026

Digital sculpture

Interoperable piece across multiple platforms

+ sabi

2026

Digital sculpture

Interoperable piece across multiple platforms

Process and Method

The process begins in the notebook.

Primary drawings and schematic studies function as the first condensation of thought. These sketches are not preparatory illustrations; they are fields where form emerges before concept stabilizes. From these drawings, a cultural reading unfolds—one that reinterprets pre-Columbian goldwork and ceramic geometries through contemporary schematization.

The project then expands into digital tridimensional modeling. Sculptures are developed in 3D environments, subjected to parametric variations, animation, and spatial reconfiguration. However, the digital is not treated as immaterial or speculative space. It is a laboratory of form—an environment where volume, rhythm, and proportion are tested with precision.

Crucially, the digital sculptures maintain a structural dialogue with painting. The painted surfaces are not secondary translations; they function as chromatic and material investigations of the same generative systems. Texture, gesso layering, oil diffusion, and color vibration in the paintings respond to the volumetric logic of the 3D models. Each medium interrogates the other.

Materialization is not the goal but a phase within an expanded cycle. Some works are translated into 3D prints, cast forms, or hand-worked surfaces in stone, wood, or gold-toned materials. These physical manifestations are not archaeological citations, but contemporary inscriptions that test how form behaves under gravity, touch, and weight.

The methodology remains open. The research continuously explores new techniques and supports, activating form across media rather than fixing it within one.

The Work as a Figital System

Forms That Breathe exists simultaneously as digital sculpture, virtual environment, and, in some cases, physical object. This figital condition does not respond to a technological strategy, but to a direct consequence of the research itself: form must circulate across planes in order to remain active.

In this project, geometry is not approached as cold abstraction. Radiating, spiral, crossed, and stepped forms operate as fields of perceptual organization: repetition structures experience, and color activates vibration. The viewer does not receive a closed message, but enters a space of expanded perception.

The ancestral does not appear as a static past, but as an active potential that continues to breathe within the body, the city, and the network.