In the pulse of late nineties and early two thousands underground culture in Spain, where coexistence, culture, and community became a territory of sensory and ephemeral experimentation, David Magán (Madrid, 1979) began to develop a vision that, over time, would define his entire artistic practice.
Trained at the well-known Escuela de Arte de Palma, in Madrid's Malasaña neighborhood, his work cannot be understood solely as sculpture; understanding his oeuvre reveals, behind the abstraction, a visual and corporal memory that, starting from experiments with glass, brings together the value of the body, light, music, and architectural space as influences that shape collective experience.
Abstract sculptor and installation artist, David Magán develops a dialogue through light, color, and the play of perceptions, generating a constant unknown about the possibilities of individual perception. Starting from manual and digital experiments, his work manages to fragment itself through movement. The result is a practice that operates on several levels simultaneously.
On one hand, it keeps the experiential dimension alive: the viewer does not observe the work from outside, but activates it with their presence and movement, altering reflections, discovering new chromatic combinations, and modifying their own perception of space. On the other hand, it introduces a reflection on how this experience is constructed, transferring the ephemeral to the analytical realm.
In David's youth, marked by a music scene that valued community and sensory experience, light became living matter. It is in that imaginary and in the small moments, when David interacted with light games, that the artist's sensibility can be understood, with a particular attraction to the intangibility of light, comprehending it not from its functionality, but as an element that constructs space and experience.
David's work is not governed by a single format. The artist explores, through photography, sculpture, installation, and digital printing, how optical interferences emerge from color and geometry, generating visual architectures in tension and harmony, as precise in their execution as they are expansive in their possibilities.
Thus, David Magán's trajectory outlines a journey that goes from immersion to construction, from collective experience to form, from intuition to precision. His work does not reproduce the aesthetic of an era, but rather translates its essence, transforming the memory of light—the light that once inhabited the air of a dance floor—into a tangible, rigorous, and profoundly contemporary architecture.
Discover the full interview in the video.
Credits:
David Magán Studio
Interview: Romina Llaguno
Video and photography: Daniel Ortiz for CACO
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