The silence, water and sand, emptiness and absence of this “landscape”, somewhere between sculpture and installation, evoke the desert mentioned in the title. This work brings together many of the signature elements of Nacho Criado’s personal creative world. Considered one of key players of Spanish , not long before he died Criado was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2008) and the National Visual Arts Award in recognition of his life’s work.

His practice focused on how an object evolves in space and on the behaviour of matter over time. Though generally associated with , his use of poor, waste materials also connected him to

 arte povera 

an art movement from the late 1960s in which the artists worked with ordinary “poor” materials which were easy to find. These included wood, leaves, stones, vegetables, fabrics or any waste material. The general rule was to reject expensive industrial materials in an attempt to reinforce creativity through a reuse of objects.

. In his early steps as an artist Criado showed a profound respect for great masters such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), to whom he paid homage in installations created in the 1970s.

Three of his series—LSD (Light Spirit Dream), Paisajes endémicos and No es la voz que clama en el desierto—converge in this piece. Here, Criado engages with a poetics of waste through the use of broken fragments. A sheet of wood rests on two buckets, filled respectively with sand and fragments of glass, an analogy of elements and testimony of ruin. The sand contained in the buckets speaks to the projects he undertook in the 1970s; the glass, a recurrent material across all his work, refers to water that time has crystallized; the metal brackets and the transparent shelves, metaphoric repositories of knowledge in the artist’s universe, are actually unable to fulfil their function of holding anything up as they are simply adhered to the surface.

The overall effect is to create a space of stillness and reflection in which the voice, the human being, cries out in the desert of emptiness, solitude and nothingness it inhabits.