ThePhoenix
2025
Carved hardwood, integrated light, walnut base
N° 016 / 020
Rising is never clean.
The Phoenix does not ascend into open air. It rises alongside something sharp, something that cuts across its path at an angle that could be obstacle or escort. The two forms do not resolve their relationship. That ambiguity is the work.
What survives does not survive unchanged. It carries the mark of what it passed through. The light in this piece does not illuminate everything. It chooses edges, reveals surfaces, leaves the rest to shadow.
The Phoenix is not about triumph. It is about what continues.
N°01
N°02Studio note
Alberto Palomino — Montréal, February 2026
The Phoenix is the only piece photographed in black and white — not as a stylistic choice but because color would have distracted from what the form is actually doing. Two elements: the upright figure, fluid and almost weightless, and the diagonal blade rising from the base at its own angle, its own logic. They do not touch. The figure ascends. The blade cuts across its path. I spent a long time deciding whether the blade should threaten or accompany. I left the answer open. The ebonized base disappears into the shadow and lets the light decide what to reveal.