Curatorial Essay

Matter as Memory in the Sculpture of Diego de Romay, by Alberto Rios de la Rosa

There exists a tradition in modern sculpture defined by the act of removal, a subtractive logic in which form is discovered inwardly, as if it already existed contained within the block and the sculptor released it from its excess. This tradition, rooted in the direct carving that Constantin Brancusi championed at the beginning of the twentieth century and later developed by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and the East–West synthesis of Isamu Noguchi, continues to produce pertinent questions regarding the relationship between mass, void and presence. The sculptural practice of Diego de Romay situates itself within this lineage as the continuation of an open enquiry: what does the material removed from a solid body represent before it loses the capacity to sustain spatial tension?

The question acquires particular theoretical weight if read from the diagram that Rosalind Krauss proposed in Sculpture in the Expanded Field (October, 1979), where modern sculpture is defined as the sum of two exclusions: that which is not landscape and that which is not architecture. Krauss described this condition as “pure negativity”, the result of a historical process that began with Rodin and culminated in the 1950s, when sculpture had lost any stable relationship with a specific site. De Romay’s works occupy a singular position within this scheme, as they preserve the verticality of the traditional monument and, at the same time, carry their site of origin within the material itself. They are sculptures that carry landscape in their cellular structure, a form of internalised site specificity that the original diagram anticipates but which De Romay’s practice fills with new content.

Formulating the question as a structural problem rather than as an aesthetic exercise is crucial to understanding what this work proposes. De Romay works from negotiation. Each block of wood from the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula arrives at the studio with a history inscribed in its grain, in the distribution of its knots, and in the tensions accumulated over decades of tropical growth. The sculptor reads this information (density, fissures, asymmetries, direction of grain) and decides where to intervene according to what the material already contains. Subtraction, undertaken together with the master artisans of Bacalar with whom he collaborates, thus operates as revelation, and the resulting form is always the product of an agreement between human intention and the organic logic of matter. This distinction matters because it situates De Romay in a specific position within sculptural theory, that of the carver who recognises in the block a prior intelligence and subordinates formal will to the internal conditions of the material. It is the same position defended by Brancusi when he abandoned modelling in clay and which Hepworth radicalised by insisting that form must emerge from physical dialogue with stone, with wood, and with the concrete resistance of each block.

Adrian Stokes, in Stones of Rimini (1934), formulated the most precise theoretical distinction of this operation: the difference between carving and modelling. Modelling is to impose a preconceived idea upon a passive material; carving is the opposite, allowing stone or wood to come alive through the figure. For Stokes, carving reveals something that already exists within physical matter. In his psychoanalytic reading, carving corresponds to the “depressive position”, or the mature attitude that recognises the independence of the other, feels concern for the damage inflicted, and seeks repair. In contrast to modelling, which dominates and subdues, carving respects the material as an autonomous entity and creates through careful encounter. When De Romay seeks trunks felled by storms and works with artisans who participate in the economic return of each piece sold, this ethic of care operates before the first cut. His training as a graduate in Ancient History from the University of St Andrews sharpens this sensibility; De Romay reads in each block a continuity with the archaic visual language of humanity, from the sculptural abstractions of prehistoric ritual objects to the human and animal forms of Mesoamerican cultures in Oaxaca and the Maya region, where material, symbolism and collective memory intertwine.

It is worth pausing on the choice of material, because it is constitutive of the project. Tzalam, chechén and katalox are hardwoods endemic to the Maya region, obtained exclusively from trees that have completed their biological cycle. This decision is ontological, since wood is a living organism that preserves within its structure the record of the seasons it has passed through and of the forces that shaped it. To carve this matter implies accepting that one works with something that had its own life and that, after the death of the tree, enters into transition. The cracks of drying, the deformations caused by humidity, and the tonal changes imposed by time are incorporated as part of the destiny of the piece, so that the sculpture continues transforming after completion. Each new fissure, each gradual darkening of the surface, each warping caused by the climate of the place where the piece resides extends the work in time and confirms that its condition is processual and that sculpture is a moment within a continuous transformation.

Herbert Read, in The Art of Sculpture (1956), defended the principle of “truth to materials”, in the sense that sculpture must reveal the inherent qualities of its medium, and that the effects proper to one material and a set of tools should never be imitated in another. Read described this quality as vitalism, where the most accomplished sculpture collaborates with the vital energy of the material rather than subduing it. De Romay takes this principle to its limit, since each sculpture carries, inscribed in its own body, the biography of the place from which it originates.

From this understanding of wood as a temporal body, the three bodies of work of De Romay are articulated. The series Symbiosis, initiated in 2019, explores the notion of connection through biomorphic forms carved in individual blocks that evoke the embrace, the cell in division, the body contained within another body. What is decisive here is the role of the void, where the apertures and concavities that traverse these sculptures operate as active agents that allow light to articulate interior volumes and transform the sculpture from static object into spatial event. Moore understood the hole as a way of allowing landscape to enter; Hepworth conceived it as an inner eye. In De Romay, the void functions as a zone of contact between two entities that depend upon one another, such as mass and absence, or the polished and the raw. Works such as Complementary, where one half retains the rough texture of the bark while the other exhibits the polished interior surface, make visible a dialectic in which two opposing natures that complete one another reveal that the unity of the piece depends upon its internal tension.

The series Anima Arbor Axis shifts attention towards verticality as organising principle. The sculptures reach up to four meters and are composed of individually carved elements assembled on a central metal axis that preserves the axial orientation of the original tree. The operation is conceptually precise, since what was a condition of biological growth becomes a condition of sculptural presence. The tree continues as axis and as vertical force that participates in perceptual cycles. The reference to totemic forms, to Brancusi’s Endless Column, to megalithic funerary markers and to the tectonic clarity of Maya architecture indicates that verticality as affirmation of presence is one of the most ancient constants in the relationship between human beings and space. Rebirth Bone, in bleached oak perforated by cavities that evoke a fossilised skeleton, and Harmony, whose sharpened forms multiply in compositions that function both as individual sculpture and spatial screen, demonstrate that verticality may be aggressive or serene, but always establishes a centre of gravity that calls the viewer’s body into relation.

Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918 in wood, 1937–38 in monumental version) is the paradigm of this sculptural verticality, as it embodies the axis mundi, the cosmic axis that connects earth and sky and appears across cultures as tree or pillar. Krauss read in this column the absorption of the pedestal into the sculpture itself, a gesture that detached it from any specific place. De Romay takes up this axial logic but anchors it again to a concrete material origin. These sculptures operate within this productive tension, generating theatrical presence through scale and verticality while simultaneously demanding slow contemplation that transcends simple confrontation with an object.

The third body of work, Substrata, introduces geological inversion. In the Yucatán Peninsula trees grow on an extremely thin layer of soil resting upon porous limestone; stone is foundation, tree is what emerges. De Romay inverts this hierarchy and proposes wood as ground and stone as that which rises from it. Wooden spheres (carbonised or polished) function as condensed landscapes from which carved limestone forms emerge. The inversion collapses radically different temporal scales, where arboreal life is measured in decades and geological sedimentation accumulated in millennia. The sphere reappears throughout this series as a recurrent form that condenses multiple readings simultaneously: planet, seed, fossil or cell. Its geometric hermeticism contrasts with the porosity of the stone emerging from it, generating material tensions that reproduce, at sculptural scale, the relationship between geological strata and the organic life that rests upon them.

Throughout Western art history, stone has occupied the summit of material hierarchy due to its durability and association with classical tradition; wood has been considered a warmer but subordinate material. By placing stone upon wood, De Romay inverts this relationship of power: the permanent rests upon the transitory, the mineral upon the organic. Giuseppe Penone, in his series Idee di pietra (2003), placed river stones in the bifurcations of bronze trees, exploring the balance between verticality and gravity. Giovanni Anselmo, within Arte Povera, dramatised the confrontation between geological permanence and organic transience in Struttura che mangia (1968), where two granite blocks crushed a lettuce. De Romay works in this same conceptual territory but inverts the relation of force, allowing the organic to sustain the geological. In Kraussian terms, these works occupy a composite position between the “marked site” (the material carries its landscape of origin) and autonomous sculpture (vertical, exhibitable, transportable), a hybrid zone anticipated by the expanded field but filled with new content through De Romay’s material specificity.

Taken together, this work proposes that monumentality is a question of intensity rather than scale, that material is an active interlocutor, and that the most honest way of intervening in matter is that which preserves its history. Each piece retains the memory of what it was (the tree, the forest, the ecosystem) while entering a new condition. A practice that affirms presence through containment, allowing weight, void and time to speak with full authority.

Alberto Ríos de la Rosa
Curator and Art Historian
Former Chief Curator, Casa Wabi
Former Curator, PAC Art Houston
Brooks International Fellow, Tate.