Diego Delas

Diego Delas

Burmese Amulets (Castillo bajo el polvo), 2024

Oil, oil bar, tempera, and acrylic dispersion on plywood 
160 x 140.5 x 4 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Burmese Amulets (Castillo bajo el polvo), Diego Delas delves into the poetics of memory, decay, and the quiet persistence of forgotten places. The work’s title merges the mystical with the mundane: Burmese amulets—objects imbued with protective and magical qualities—are juxtaposed with the image of a "castle under the dust," evoking a buried architecture of the past, faded yet resonant. Referencing the writing of Jordi Coca and Toni Morrison’s poignant reflections on memory in Beloved (1987), Delas explores how places can hold on to traces of what once occurred within them—how memory clings to matter, even as time erodes clarity.

Delas’s visual language is rooted in a deep engagement with vernacular architecture—functional, unofficial, and often improvised forms that carry layers of lived experience and emotional resonance. These structures, typically located in rural or transitional landscapes, are approached not as static monuments but as evolving, responsive entities. They serve as guardians of collective and personal memory, shaped by generations of adaptation and improvisation. In this painting, as in much of his practice, Delas incorporates apotropaic signs—symbols traditionally used to ward off evil—recontextualizing them as modernist glyphs for hope, remembrance, and survival.

His work resists binary narratives of ruin or progress, instead offering a space where histories, myths, and speculative futures intertwine. Delas’s painterly surfaces are dense with suggestion, inviting viewers to consider how architecture can witness and participate in human experience and how stories are embedded in walls, dust, and silence.

This inquiry into the affective qualities of space also extends to Delas’s collaboration with Leonor Serrano Rivas on Breathings of the Moon (2022), a video work commissioned by TBA21–Academy with the support of the European Commission’s STARTS initiative. Filmed in the Venice Lagoon, the work takes inspiration from the cosmological experiments of seventeenth-century scholar Athanasius Kircher, simulating the lagoon’s tidal movements using pigments and magnets in a microcosmic model. Set against the realities of climate crisis and ecological transformation, the piece reflects Delas’s interest in narrative and ritual as tools to reshape our relationship with the natural world—inviting an attunement to the unseen rhythms, breathings, and magic of our environments.