Forged steel, mill water, and the time it takes for a thing to become earth again.
Pelayo Pinín was born in Taramundi in 1987 and took his degree in Havana. He works with cutlery steel, canal water and sugar, under a single opening condition: the work must get worse while it is on show.
He has made ten exhibitions in fourteen years. He has attended none of them.
He was born on 8 September 1987 in Taramundi, in western Asturias, in a house two hundred metres from a forge and four kilometres from the road. His maternal great-grandfather left for Cuba in 1919 with a suitcase of knives to sell and never came back. The family went on writing to that address for sixty years and never received an answer.
In 2004, aged seventeen, Pinín went to Havana to find the building the letters had been sent to. He found an empty lot. He stayed anyway: he entered the Instituto Superior de Arte and graduated in Visual Arts in 2009, at twenty-two. He says he learned two things in those five years, neither of them taught in class: that iron lasts half as long in the Caribbean, and that a material coming apart in front of you does not need a discourse added to it.
Between 2009 and 2012 he showed nothing. He returned to Taramundi, worked as a grinder in local knife workshops and spent two winters rebuilding the wheel of a mill that no longer milled. He calls this period los años mudos, the mute years, and maintains it is the only work of his that came out entirely right.
He debuted the month after turning twenty-five, in Mexico City. Since then he has shown every eighteen months, without exception, never moving a date forward or back for any reason. He lived in Berlin from 2016 to 2021, and afterwards between Los Angeles and Wedding. He works today, according to his only public statement on the matter, «somewhere on the straight line between Taramundi and Berlin, which does not exist».
He is not photographed, does not attend his openings and gives no interviews. At each opening a person from the city — chosen by the gallery, never by him — reads a two-page text aloud. Afterwards they leave and never speak in the artist's name again.
On the name. Pelayo is the one who starts something from inside a cave. Pinín, in Asturian, is the one still learning to walk. The artist chose both halves at once and has never explained which of them was meant seriously.
All the work comes from three materials that exist in both Taramundi and Havana: iron, fresh water and sugar. The steel comes from cutlery offcuts in western Asturias. The water is drawn from a mill canal and carried in demijohns. The sugar is raw cane, and works as an accelerant: dissolved in salt water it attacks steel far faster than water alone.
The pieces are installed clean on opening day and left to react for the whole run. Nobody stabilises them. The gallery must accept two conditions by contract: no humidity control, and no piece removed even if it falls.
On closing day the residual water from each piece is filtered, bottled and labelled with the city and the date. Those bottles travel to the next exhibition and are poured over the new steel. Every installation therefore physically contains all the previous ones.
The result is a count that can only rise. In 2012 it was four litres. In Berlin, in 2026, it was one hundred and twelve, and part of that liquid has not touched air in fourteen years.
Pinín refers to the entire body of work since 2012 by a single title: El nombre prestado, the borrowed name.
The right-hand column is the accumulated residue: the litres of rusted water collected at the close of each exhibition, added to all the previous ones and carried on to the next.
Galería Terreno Baldío, Mexico City — Colonia Juárez · curated by Ximena Robledo
Debut, one month after his twenty-fifth birthday. Eleven unsharpened Taramundi steel blades hung at exactly the height of a visitor's hand, under a drip of sugared water. By closing day the room smelled of burnt caramel.
Espacio La Balsa, Bogotá — La Macarena · curated by Sebastián Uribe-Toro
First work with sound: fourteen microphoned demijohns of mill water, in a room 2,600 metres above sea level. The water took longer to react than expected and the show was extended by three weeks.
Casa Ferrería, Medellín — Prado Centro · curated by Adriana Quintero
Installed in a courtyard house with the fountain running. The series Cartas de Indias appears here for the first time: paper pressed with iron filings that writes its own stain over months.
Rostwerk Projektraum, Berlin — Wedding · curated by Katharina Selm
First European exhibition, a year after moving to the city. An unheated hall, no humidity control, original concrete floor. This is the installation that fixed the definitive method: clean steel on day one, no maintenance until the last.
Wasserhaus, Bonn — Beuel · curated by Jonas Wehrle
A 1:1 reconstruction of the mill wheel Pinín repaired in Taramundi between 2010 and 2011, this time in steel meant to corrode. It turned for seventy-eight days and stopped by itself.
Dry River Projects, Los Angeles — Boyle Heights · curated by Marisol Barrantes
Installed on 3 April 2020, it never opened. It stayed up and closed for the full four months, visible only from the pavement through the window. Pinín refused to take it down early and refused to document it. The water evaporated inside the room: it is the only exhibition that adds not one litre to the total.
Salitre, Miami — Little Haiti · curated by Ximena Robledo
The fastest show to degrade: ambient humidity above 75 % throughout. From here on Pinín stops selling work and lends it on deposit instead, on condition that it is never restored.
The Mill Room, Houston — East End · curated by Adriana Quintero
A former metal workshop. For the first time the venue contributes its own material: offcuts found in the building, mixed with steel brought from Asturias without distinguishing which is which.
Fogbank, San Francisco — Dogpatch · curated by Katharina Selm
An Asturian title, left untranslated in every gallery text — it names a fine drizzle that does not quite fall. Misters in the ceiling and windows open to the bay fog. The central piece, fourteen suspended plates, rusted so evenly that the gallery had to state in writing that they were not painted.
Zollhalle 4, Berlin — Neukölln · curated by Jonas Wehrle and Marisol Barrantes
A fourteen-year survey in the city where the European period began. The ninety litres accumulated since 2012 were poured in one go over sixty square metres of new steel. It closed on 12 July. The sheet has not been cleaned.
2012 — ongoing
Blades forged in Taramundi workshops to the traditional local pattern, but never sharpened. They hang at hand height and are left under a drip. The shape is a tool's; the function is to wait.
2015 — ongoing
Sheets of cotton paper pressed with iron filings and dampened once only. The stain advances for months and produces a text nobody wrote. Each piece is titled with the date of a family letter sent to Havana and never answered.
2018 — 2023
Five mill wheels built in fast-corroding steel and set turning with the gallery's own water. Each stopped of its own accord, between forty and one hundred and four days in. None was restarted.
2013 — ongoing
Not exactly a series: it is the archive. Glass bottles holding the water filtered at the close of each exhibition, labelled with city and date. It is the only work of Pinín's that grows without his intervention, and the only one never shown whole.
Pinín does not make objects: he sets a start date and steps aside. What the visitor looks at is not a finished sculpture, it is the exact point at which they found it.
In Bonn the wheel turned for seventy-eight days. When it stopped, nobody at the gallery dared touch it for a week, in case it started again. That week is the work.
An artist who does not appear forces you to look at what he left. It is the oldest trick in the trade and it still works because it is not a trick.
This is work about emigration that shows neither a suitcase nor a ship. It shows wet metal. And it works better that way.
All correspondence goes to the studio. Pinín gives no interviews, provides no images of himself and takes no part in opening events.
Studio and correspondence: taller@pelayopinin.art
Press and galleries: prensa@pelayopinin.art
Exhibition conditions, without exception: gallery humidity is not regulated, no piece is restored during the run, no piece is removed even if it comes away, and the residual water is handed to the studio on closing day.