‘It smells of iron! – said my friend Sergi as we descended the Mauberme, a steep peak at the northern end of the Aran Valley, in the Central Pyrenees. To our right the rusty river Unhola rushed down, turning everything in its path an orangey red. Further up, from where we had come, the Liats and Urets mines – an old mining operation that once extracted lead and zinc – had opened deep chasms in the mountain from which now, helped by the rainwater, the iron ores were descending and rusting. It was a much easier descent than it once was to transport the extracted metals, aided by complex systems of pulleys, rails and iron wagons, abandoned up there and now also rusted. We climbed that Mauberme in iron.

Back in Galicia I go down to a hollow mountain, an open pit from which copper was extracted until the eighties; the controversial mine of Touro and O Pino. It is a huge hole in the mountain that now, more than thirty years later and helped by the use of technosols to accelerate the appearance of vegetation, has become a Reactive Wetland: a landscape made of iron with its staggered hills and patches of ‘high tech’ vegetation with a strong smell of sulphur and metal.

From the cuttings of the mine, the constant rain drags the acids until they reach rivers like the Portapego, now completely red and turned in some stretches into a real clayey quagmire stained with rust, which like quicksand blocks everything in its path. I know this because I tried to get close and my legs were blocked up to the knee, so I picked up rust at the same point in the river and got out of there in iron.

From these two experiences germinates a series of iron paintings that arise from agitated processes engraved in nature itself and that use only iron oxide and river water as materials. Taking the cycle of water and the river as the visible process of a brutal transformation of the landscape that took place higher up, on the top of a mountain, operated by the human activity of metallic mining. A hierro uses force to drag the wet paintings across the landscape itself, in a process in which the grass itself becomes a chaotic army of brushes. He fricts with nature and uses it, and even so, all that force that is engraved on the surface of the canvas is able to coexist with a certain delicacy thanks to the movement of the water, seeking that natural balance. The vegetation is not represented, it is simply there and it is made of iron. Just like the river. Just like the wind and the stratified landscape. Everything is liquid and undulates in a more or less dense movement. The landscape paints itself; in iron.

irene grau