About the Artist

Reina Azabache — Contemporary Artist

I am Reina Azabache, the artistic identity of Carmen Calvo Rivas.

My practice emerges from a fascination with matter, transformation and the traces that remain after something changes.

I work primarily with resin, wood, pigments, gold leaf, acrylic paint and mineral elements, creating unique pieces in which irregularity, texture and material behaviour are not imperfections to be corrected, but part of the work itself.

My relationship with art began long before I decided to make it the centre of my professional life. For years, creation existed alongside other paths. Eventually, what had occupied a private and persistent space became impossible to treat as secondary.

Reina Azabache was born from that transition.

My current research is articulated through UMBRAL, an evolving body of work exploring the relationship between matter, presence, memory, transformation and custody.

UMBRAL brings together physical works and digital counterparts without treating one as a replacement for the other. I am interested precisely in the tension between them: what can exist physically only once, what can persist as a digital trace, and what happens to an artwork as it moves through time.

Technology enters my practice from this perspective.

Blockchain, NFTs and evolving forms of digital memory are not the centre of the work. They are tools through which I investigate continuity, trace and transmission while preserving the singularity of the physical object.

This research has also transformed the way I understand ownership.

I prefer to speak of custody.

A person who receives one of my works does not simply acquire an object. They become part of its trajectory, caring for something that existed before them and whose history may continue beyond them.

The first reception of a work therefore forms part of the artwork itself. Certain pieces incorporate a private protocol conceived exclusively for their first custodian: an encounter with the physical work that cannot be fully transferred to an image, a screen or a public exhibition.

Some traces may remain.

Others are deliberately left undocumented.

I am interested in that boundary: between what can be seen and what remains hidden, between what can be recorded and what must be experienced, between permanence and disappearance.

My work does not attempt to resolve these tensions.

It inhabits them.

Received, not acquired.
Entrusted, not owned.

Reina Azabache