SAVAGE UNTAMED: BIRTH IN ISOLATION

Savage Untamed is not born as an artistic name conceived from the comfort of a desk. It is born after isolation. It is born on the edge. It is born when the world stops and the urgent need to build one's own refuge appears, so as not to go dark.
During the 2020 pandemic, while borders closed and daily life hung in suspension, I found in the Sylene something more than a boat. It was a hideout, a minimal territory, a floating body, a temporary home, and a border against collapse. Living aboard was not merely a circumstance: it was a foundational experience. The boat forced me to coexist with silence, with water, with wood, with rust, with humidity, with solitude, and with a different form of time.
Within that open confinement, surrounded by the river, a question began to emerge that still sustains my work: what remains of oneself when the known world goes dark?
The nautical corner of the San Fernando Club island then became a territory of resistance. It was not a formal studio. It was not a space legitimized by the art circuit. It was a precarious, peripheral, almost secret refuge. But it was precisely there that the strength appeared. That place gradually transformed into a studio because painting needed to exist. The sails, the canvases, the nautical debris, the improvised stretchers, the available matter, and the atmosphere of the river began to blend with an inner necessity: to leave marks, to discharge energy, to construct signals.
The pandemic did not only bring confinement. It also opened a rift. Within that rift, Savage Untamed appeared.
Not as a character, but as a zone of truth. A part of me that no longer wanted to adapt entirely, that refused to return docilely to the previous order, that needed to defend a primitive sensitivity against an increasingly domesticated world. Savage Untamed emerges as a response to going dark. It emerges from isolation, but not to remain locked away. It emerges from the refuge, but to cross borders. It emerges from the river, the boat, and the improvised studio as a pictorial identity that understands painting as an act of survival.
Painting in that context was a way of resisting. Not a heroic or discursive resistance, but a bodily one. Staining, scraping, covering, veiling, letting paint drop, working on surfaces tied to the journey and the elements. The work began to take the shape of an inner navigation.
That is where the Pandemia 2020 series comes from. That is where the insistence on working with territories, borders, membranes, and heartbeats comes from. That is where the search for a painting that is not just an image comes from, but a presence, a remnant, a signal, and a refuge.
The boat was the first threshold. The island studio was the first untamed territory. Painting was the way not to disappear.
Since then, my work has been organized around that initial experience: the need to build a space of one's own in the midst of collapse. A space where matter can speak before language. Where the gesture retains something of the primitive. Where painting functions as a mark against oblivion.
I do not paint to represent the pandemic. I paint from the transformation it produced within me.
I paint from that moment when isolation ceased to be merely confinement and became a revelation: there was an inner strength that needed to get out, to take shape, to occupy a surface, to ignite.
That strength is called Savage Untamed.