ARTIST LUCAS DE LA RUBIA
Lucas de la Rubia Works Towards the Silence Between a Body and an Object
Lucas de la Rubia doesn't fit neatly into any single category — which is probably the point. The Madrid-based artist moves between sculpture, canvas, photography, video, and now performance, guided not by medium but by question. His most recent solo show explored silence and the relationship between a body and an object. His current project is being built in collaboration with a dancer. He ended our conversation with a quote from Eduardo Chillida. It told us everything.
There is a discipline to how Lucas de la Rubia works that you don't often find in artists who resist easy categorisation. Mornings are for thinking — compositions, ideas, the mental architecture of a piece. Afternoons are for the hands: cutting, sanding, assembling, the slow physical work of making a thing exist in the world. It is a division that sounds almost administrative until you understand what it protects. The thinking time is sacred. The making time follows from it, never the other way around.
He came to this practice through an unusual set of entry points. Self-taught at the core, mentored in his youth by painter and sculptor Manuel March, then through the early years of architectural studies, a degree in industrial design, an engraving workshop at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City. Not a straight line — more like a series of different languages, each one adding to the vocabulary. What emerged is a practice that moves comfortably between sculpture, canvas, photography, and video without any of them feeling like a detour.
His influences shift depending on where he is in the work. Mid-process, deep in the making, he reaches for poetry, dance, cinema, music — the other arts, the ones that move in time rather than space. Between projects, in the research phase, he visits studios, sees exhibitions, draws from artists physically nearby. There is something deliberate in this — a refusal to let influence become habit, to let the same references calcify into a style.
The most recent solo show, Halo a ras, crystallises what this shifting attention produces. Sculptures, canvases, photographs, a video piece — multiple registers held together by a single question: the silence between a body and an object. Not the body in motion, not the object as form, but the charged and difficult space between them. The gap, again — the in-between that serious artists keep returning to because it refuses to be resolved.
"Wellbeing, for me, is having enough mental peace to think and act in the most honest way towards oneself and others."
It is a spare definition, and a revealing one. Not happiness, not success, not recognition — mental peace as the precondition for honesty. For an artist whose work keeps circling the territory between the interior and the exterior, between the self and the world, it is less a statement about lifestyle than a working principle.
The book Bye Yuki — just published, collecting works from 2018 to 2023, structured around a long conversation with curator Yuki Tanaka — offers a rare chance to see five years of a practice in a single frame. And what the current project points toward suggests the frame is already expanding. A large-scale piece designed to interact with the body, made in collaboration with dancer Nora Franco. A move from the silence between a body and an object to the live, present, unrepeatable fact of a body in performance.
The direction makes sense. An artist with an architectural eye, a sculptor's understanding of space, and a practice built around the charged relationship between interior states and physical form — performance is not a departure. It is where the questions he has always been asking become impossible to contain in a single object.
He closes the conversation with Eduardo Chillida: "Alert and free until the end, guided solely by an aroma."
In four words — alert and free — Chillida captured what the best artistic lives actually look like from the inside. De la Rubia chose the quote carefully.
Lucas de la Rubia is an artist and teacher based in Madrid. His book Bye Yuki (2018–2023) is available now. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.
Interview by Leila Antakly
