Sometimes it all begins with a walk. Not with an idea, nor with a sketch, but with something as simple as looking at the ground. Picking up a leaf, a seed, a shape with no clear purpose. In Daniel Salorio\u2019s case, that intuitive gesture is the origin of a body of work that has spent almost two decades transforming plant matter into what he defines as \u2018botanical sculptures\u2019.<\/p>\n
We meet in Santa Gertrudis, very close to the charming Estudio Laterna, where he has just taken down his latest exhibition on the island. The pieces are gone, but the sensation remains of having come into contact with living forms suspended in the air, somewhere between the organic and the dreamlike.<\/p>\n
Salorio didn\u2019t study art. Nor did he want to. \u201cI was absolutely rubbish at drawing,\u201d he says. His journey began in music, as a percussionist, with training in Cuba and Brazil, and projects such as the group Livika or the current TranceUntes, where he blends organic rhythms with a performance style that straddles live and electronic music. But his artistic language was born in Ibiza, many years ago, during a summer in a house lost in the middle of the countryside. \u201cThere was a lot of downtime and a very special garden,\u201d he recalls. He began playing with plant debris, constructing tiny insects. And something clicked.<\/p>\n
Since then, his process has hardly changed. It all begins outside the studio. In the countryside, in a garden, on a journey. Salorio collects objects that catch his eye because of their shape, texture or an intuition that is hard to explain, and gathers them without yet knowing what they will become. In his studio, organised into transparent boxes, these pieces await the moment when they will be assembled. With hardly any intervention. Without forcing it. Letting the form emerge. \u201cI hardly touch the organic part at all,\u201d he explains. His work consists more of joining than transforming, of respecting each original structure so that, when combined, it generates something new. That is where what he calls the \u201cmetaform\u201d appears, a figure that the eye recognises, but not entirely. A bird, an insect, a fish. Or something completely different. That ambiguity is part of his language. \u201cOur brain naturally completes reality,\u201d he says. And in that interplay between what we see and what we think we see lies the power of his work. His universe feeds on that constant observation. Sometimes almost obsessively. He is fascinated, for example, by the structure of certain seeds. The coconut palm, he explains, has an enormous seed that rarely reaches the ground intact. When it does, he transforms it into large-scale pieces: whales up to two metres long constructed from a single plant element.<\/p>\n\n\t\t