Gabriel Coca in conversation with Victoria Ríos

1. Investigation and exploration, would be the guidelines that the master gives to the apprentice, nonetheless, both will never ever be separated from the creator's path.

For me it is fundamental to know the materials I work with. Investigate the properties of each medium. Also, recognise and surrender to its limits, or the contrary, work against them. At the same time, it is important to know which is the path to be followed, even though getting lost is equally valuable and probably inevitable. Creation as investigation and exploration of the medium, de world and myself.

2. What is the work for you? What are your interests, your questions, your answers...

I conceive it as the result of an act, the record of an experience, a trace. I'd say that it is the consequence of being alive. It is born from the desire of doing and seeing something new.

I am interested in doing what I yet don't know. Build and develop my own technique from the constant dwell between the search and the resignation of style. Doing something in art is a way of perceiving and relating to the world, a way of being. My questions are: what is it that I desire to see? Each painting is a different answer. Who is the one that desires? There is no answer. Can a sensation be created or is it the sensation that creates us?

3. We could say that a part from the plastics the great protagonist in your work is time. Time is one material more, as important as the canvas.

My endeavour is to observe and give myself to the present, to the rhythm of creation, to painting's time. Seek that the artwork does itself: not for me to try and make it, but to make it appear somehow. I imagine the painting as a fragment of time standing still. The painted, as a present made material.

4. What is Gabriel Coca's context? Where is your work born? From what does it feed?

My context is my house and a small city, under a mountain and in front of the sea. I share studio with people I admire. My partner, family and friends. The conversations with them.

Seeing each sunrise, spending time on my own and drifting through the city. I move between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. I don't know where my work is born, what I know is that the basic food is silence.

5. Should the work be the result of an internal process? Should it talk, emanate, generate?

I think that that internal process would be to build myself, and that for me is the act of creation: from there the work sprouts. What interests me is its presence and the relationship that is established with the viewer. I am attracted by what I miss at first glance, what is not in it, that which I can't name. I like for it to pierce me, to surprise me, to catch me and throw me outside myself. In Petricor, the exhibition that I had in SC Gallery, I think something special happened, not only in thee process but also in the exhibition space.

I'd like for painting to be perceived as it is, an event of light and color; that it never ends, not in the sensation nor the word. That it be a question with no answer, a mystery.