Artist Statement . Agnus Dei. Homenaje a Zurbarán
The work departs from authentic historical documents (eighteenth and nineteenth-century manuscripts, musical scores) arranged as a modular grid on a dark ground. Fire is applied as a drawing tool: controlled burning produces translucent veils through which the sacrificial figure emerges, not depicted but revealed by the partial destruction of the surface. The lamb is never drawn. It appears where the paper yields to heat, where handwriting and notation become shadow and skin.
The reference to Zurbarán is not stylistic but structural. Where the Spanish master isolated the bound lamb against a bare background, here the animal materializes within layers of accumulated historical time. The documents are not illustrations of the past. They are physical carriers of duration, and the fire that degrades them is the same force that makes the image visible.
A single taxidermied butterfly, placed at the threshold between legibility and erasure, introduces organic presence and marks the point where the archive ceases to be readable and becomes body.
Enrique Moya (b. Spain) is an artist based in Arezzo, Italy, working with mixed media and installation. He has taught in the Italian public school system for eigth years, currently at the Liceo Artistico di Arezzo, where his pedagogical work on vision, colour, and drawing as cognitive practice runs parallel to his studio research. His artistic practice centers on the use of authentic historical documents (eighteenth and nineteenth-century manuscripts, Torah scrolls, scientific engravings) as physical ground for layered works that incorporate drawing, photographic transfer, taxidermied butterflies, and fire. The historical time embedded in each document is not quoted but reactivated through material processes that simultaneously preserve and destroy the original surface. His principal series include Reborn, developed on Torah parchments; Agnus Dei. Homenaje a Zurbarán, a dialogue with Spanish painting tradition through organic and archival materials; and About Words, an investigation of the relationship between written language, document, and image. He has exhibited in Arezzo, Florence, Turin, and Norman, Oklahoma (USA).