Mountains have a quality that invoke a feeling similar to that of when we experience ocean or space. They make us, feel small, and this in turn makes us feel vulnerable; this body of work tries to illustrate the indescribable. For Ascencio Fuentes, vulnerability is a state of creation, it is part of the artistic process.
'Ceci n’est pas une montagne' is a project with 3 main branches where Ascencio Fuentes explores the discovery and the formation of mountains where they should not exist, thus being fictitious mountains, the first branch takes the written word as its base and the second one uses the wood of the trees and the pass of the time inside them and the third one with ocean waves, to make a direct reference to ‘La Trashion des images’ by René Magritte, where he talks about the representation of objects and not of the objects themselves.
‘Every Year Is a Mountain’ uses the grain of the wood that in itself generates a silhouette of a mountain. The veins are the result of making a cross section in the trunk of a tree, passing through its rings , which are the representation of the growth of the tree year after year. The neon light is a replica of the silhouette, a mountain is presented in a more direct way, a light that attracts the eyes, again it’s the exercise of standing on the edge of the mountain and experiencing this ‘vital danger’ that makes us feel the beauty.