Fomhalart

Art, Magic & Evocation

Welcome to this visual space. I am an independent, self-taught artist, guided by a profoundly bohemian sensibility. It's an attitude that is inherent to me and fascinates me: I haven't followed a traditional academic path, preferring a freer approach, free from dogmatic teachings, learning directly from nature and creating by instinct. I don't have a rigid or predetermined method of production. I create wherever I see fit. My creative process can ignite in the silence of a forest, where a stone and a piece of wood combine to give rise to a sudden idea. It can arise in the intimacy of my studio, or in the lively chaos of my local blacksmith's workshop, where he generously lets me use his tools to give form and substance to the material. This freedom of exploration allows me to develop authentic aesthetic research, driven solely by vocation and direct experimentation in the field. I believe that art shouldn't be explained with complex technical jargon, but should speak for itself through emotion. For this reason, I prefer to let only the materials and works speak, allowing the stone, wood, and iron to tell their own story.

TOTAL BLACK MORTAR

This piece was born of an eighty-year wait and a transformed destiny. My great-grandparents were carriage makers in the 1930s, and this work tells their story as well. At the heart of the object lies the steel hub of a carriage wheel—likely discarded back then due to a crack; instead of being thrown away, it sat on the sill of my great-grandparents' porch for nearly a century, a silent witness to the passage of time. Today, I have breathed new life into it by adding an old iron bolt from a railway sleeper—serving as a handle—and attaching a metal sphere that acts as a pestle. The receptacle below, where the material to be ground is placed, was fashioned from another iron sphere cut in half, salvaged from workshop scrap. The finish is the result of pure empirical experimentation: the hub’s antique steel resisted the standard burnishing process, forcing me to paint it for preservation, whereas the receptacle and grinding sphere were treated using an artisanal hot-burnishing technique. Rejecting mass-produced industrial methods, I have recreated this magical ritual by sourcing and combining rare, hard-to-find materials. It is an experiment born of patience, evoking the ancient alchemy of metals and revealing their hidden chromatic mysteries—a postmodern assemblage that restores life to forgotten elements.

Yakintsugi coat rack

Fire-treated chestnut wood, restoration resin, and hand-turned iron hooks. A work born from the experimental encounter between two ancient Japanese philosophies, fused together starting from its very name. The structure of this coat rack is a chestnut log that I intentionally blackened and charred on the surface using the Yakisugi technique, making it eternal and giving it a dark, deep, and textured color. Subsequently, inspired by the spirit of Kintsugi, I celebrated the cracks opened by the fire, filling them with a resin pour. The hooks and their respective knobs were entirely shaped and turned from raw iron, rejecting any ready-made industrial elements. The result is a unique piece where the fragility of burned wood and the strength of forged metal blend into a new magic."

Born of the storm

This furnishing piece leverages the natural vertical splitting of a lightning-struck fir trunk, preserving the irregular grain and the upper section to showcase the original aesthetic shaped by the weather event. Following a thorough cleaning and stabilization of the hollow interior, a two-level lighting system was developed: a shielded internal source casts a grazing light that escapes through the trunk's natural fissures, while an external micro-LED string with dark wiring wraps around the surface grain, accentuating the piece's volume, materiality, and verticality.

Contact me at [email protected]