Artists in lockdown: Tomás Espina

“Destruction as an image formation process has been constant in my career as an artist,” says Tomás Espina contemporary Argentinian artist, speaking from his home in Buenos Aires in the throes of the pandemic.

Espina, whose richly symbolic work can be found in the Nicole Brachetti Peretti Collection, is at the forefront of artistic expression that deals with times of crisis, danger and unrest. “Violence works as a determinant in my work,” he adds, and this is true, well beyond its subject matter. Gunpowder, soot and charcoal are just some of the materials you will find about his studio, mediums that Espina terms, “aggressive and unstable.” His rugged, thought-provoking and diverse oeuvre takes from the urgent nature of photojournalism, iconoclastic in its warping and glitching of black and white scenes of war and protest, and channels the saccharine surrealism of Dark Romanticism. 

Espina claims his artistic outlook remains unadulterated amidst the delicate socio-political climate conjured from the spread of Covid-19. “I don’t feel that the themes of my work have changed,” he explains, “But the work I’m producing has become far more introspective and vital in essence. When the outside world closes in and faces adversity, an extraordinary vitalism appears, and I think this has found its way into my studio and my creative processes throughout the lockdown. I am more in touch now than I have ever been with essential, pressing issues of our time.”

And the world has indeed closed up around Espina in the same way it has dampened and slowed around all of us. “I have the constant feeling that time has dilated, slowed to a halt, as if one is living in another era, another century,” he says, adding, “I would be lying if I said I take no comfort in this new pace.” The comforting, measured pace of the last four months has been a useful resource for Espina, and has led him to a higher plane of artistic proliferation: “This new silence and global slowness have helped me to increase my periods of concentration in the workshop. It has also led me to recover techniques and processes in my work that I’d previously discarded.” 

There is also the fundamental issue of the availability of artistic materials to contend with, and these obstacles have catalysed a force for change in Espina’s daily output. He explains, “All the stores have been closed, so I have been forced to recycle the materials that I had stored in the workshop. I am now painting with oils after a twenty-year hiatus from the material. Using oils on papers already worked with soot and gunpowder, I have produced works that resemble apocalyptic palimpsests. They are highly textural pieces comprising a series that I have named, Mi priopia y ajena Oscuridad (My own and foreign Darkness).”

The lockdown in Buenos Aires has proven to be a time-rich period for reflection for Espina. He believes that the pandemic has triggered much introspection and retrospection at both international and personal levels. “This is undoubtedly a good time to rethink everything,” he says. “The pandemic has shown us that there are many roads to take, while we have only been travelling on one.” The artistic community, he believes, needs to re-evaluate its priorities in the wake of Covid-19: “Over the last twenty years, the art market has transformed into a bubble that distances art from the economic and social realities of the majority of people in the world. I dream that art can be more accessible as we re-emerge from this crisis. Art is for all, not just for the privileged few.”