Lluc Baños proposes me to continue together a conversation started months ago. A debate not exclusively between him and me, but between a larger group of which we were both part, and which took as its starting point a question with which the writer Richard Sennet began, in his essay The Craftsman, a chapter about something he has called material consciousness.

Is our awareness of things independent of the things themselves? He wondered, to later point out that if anything makes an object interesting it is the field of self-consciousness -that of the craftsman in that case-, and that all his efforts to achieve good quality work depend on his curiosity about the material he has in his hands.

Among the different types of artists, if there are any two alike, I have always been more interested in the persevering ones than in those who try at all costs to feed the image of genius, those whose work seeks to appear to be the fruit of a state of grace. Lluc tells me some of the reasons that have led him in recent years to work on a couple of series of stone sculptures, and I decipher that there is a lot of love for the craft, but also a lot of surrender to a routine.

I understand that his way of working is halfway between the figure of the artist and that of the craftsman, not the artist who uses the specialized hand of the craftsman, but the artist who on many levels works like the craftsman.

This is why he does not deny the decisions that have to be made by the artist Lluc, nor does he avoid speaking or operating at times in the way the other Lluc does, the one who arrives at the workshop as the stonemason who carves ornaments does, and operates to a large extent as he would. That is to say, based on a knowledge of the technique, and based on a desire to improve it, but of course avoiding falling into empty flourishes.

Regarding some small sculptures that Lluc made with the birdseed of a bird that had escaped from him, he comments:

“I was interested above all in that symbolic character of the material, the birdseed as the food of that which rises.”

I have had this phrase in front of me for weeks, and only now have I understood that it defines in a resounding way what Lluc Baños is looking for.

Ángel Calvo Ulloa