Hanon, the virtuoso pianist

Installation view: “11th Auditorio de Galicia Prize” juried show. Auditorio de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2019

I am a visual artist and musician, and my practice focuses on the relationship between time and space through strategies of repetition. My training as a classical pianist is fundamental to this research, as the repetition of gestures is an essential part of musical practice and bodily memory.

This piece is based on The Virtuoso Pianist by Charles-Louis Hanon (1873), a collection of technical exercises built on repetitive patterns that move across the keyboard. In my drawings, I transcribe these scores by removing pitch and rhythm, representing only the relationships between notes, thus making visible the repetitive patterns and gestures inherent to piano practice.

In contrast to the ephemeral nature of music, these drawings function as a record of time: an attempt to capture, through a manual, repetitive, and meticulous process, the time experienced and measured by the body.