Statement
My work emerges from pain and loss, from experiences that leave a deep mark by disarticulating meaning. In the face of this rupture, artistic practice becomes a transitional space: a way of moving through mourning and allowing it to find another form of existence.
I work with assemblages and paintings, combining fragments, remnants, and diverse materials as part of a process of sublimation. The work is constructed, both conceptually and aesthetically,as a ritual: a repeated, insistent gesture through which trauma is displaced into matter and allowed to transform.
Guitars, fish, elephants, and pachyderms appear as presences that carry not only memory, but also weight and fragility, finding in form different possibilities for repair and restitution. Personal artistic experience thus becomes a mechanism for holding these emotions without repressing them. I do not seek to represent pain literally, nor to narrate an intimate story, but rather to open a space where lived experience becomes images and forms capable of sustaining loss, making it visible and shareable, allowing art to exercise its transformative power.
Jorge Bafico.
About the work
Emilio Bolinches
Uruguayan artist
They are neither traditional paintings nor sculptures; they are sculptural objects. Jorge Bafico’s artistic creations seek to transform discarded materials into art. They are loose parts that he brings together and resignifies, nothing more than a gesture of poetry.
“Jorge Bafico presents himself as an emerging artist whose expressive maturity is deeply intertwined with his literary work. This is what gives validity to his visual practice, which he has pursued continuously and with dedication. The emotional and the technical are shaping and maturing at precisely the right moment, with passion and authenticity, along a path defined by the firmness of his concepts. It has been an enormous pleasure for me to witness this process from the very beginning and to accompany and support Jorge in this new stage of his life as a fully realized visual artist, which was born in the workshop I direct.”
Silvana Nicola
Diario El País
Bafico’s deconstructed figures are composed of screws, nuts, pins, logs, wood, and paint. The devastating pain of losing his son just hours after birth compelled him to write his most recent book, after which he discovered a new talent: the ability to gather discarded materials and transform them into “artistic objects”, something he had never done before the death of the child and of his own parents. They are neither traditional paintings nor sculptures.
Jorge Bafico’s artistic creations cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as a continuation of So Close to Shining. Through this creative vein, the psychoanalyst transforms discarded materials into art, loose parts that he brings together and resignifies.
Ricardo Botana
UyArtistas
A psychoanalyst in practice since 1993, Doctor of Psychology, educator, and writer, Jorge Bafico becomes an artist through a decisive and painful event in his life. The death of his son Benjamín plunges him into a difficult period that, as a form of catharsis, ultimately triggers creative processes resulting in his book So Close to Shining, which in turn inspired and led to the creation of a series of forty artworks that form part of his exhibition Generations.
Bafico works with fish, though also with elephants and guitars, as if the inevitable course were a constant flow through an existence charged with unexpected, liquid, crystalline occurrences that slip through his fingers without the possibility of containment. There is no fixed constant in his work, even when it may seem otherwise, and certainly no emptiness. Everything is laden with signifiers that feed a burdened yet sincere mode of expression: an incoherent plea of old memories gathered into an unexpected and painful ending that also marks the beginning of new questions and paths. Wood, metal, textures, and colors, orderly yet disjointed, summarize a determined stance toward giving aesthetic form to sensations that outwit suffering, filling an inner, strident silence with art.
Perhaps the use of cold metal also reveals an urgent need to remove heat from thought and feeling. Discarded materials, fragments joined and resignified to compose his work, also reassemble his life and attempt to reposition it toward a future that must continue to be traversed. Psychology, his lifelong field, undoubtedly guides and focuses this act of creating in order to go on living. The artist’s work is deeply compelling and far from conventional. Through Bafico, we are shown and reminded that art is an experience without limits, one that ultimately helps us live.