BIRTH AND DEATH IN THE MOUNTAINS

Mount Perdón, in Navarre, Spain, could easily be mistaken for just another feature of the Spanish landscape: an unassuming hill, bisected by a road and crowned with windmills. At what point does an ordinary mountain cease to be just that and become a unique mountain—the subject of a painting, an object of worship, or the setting for a story?

The birth took place on August 24, 2020. That day, a 15-month-old baby touched the ground for the first time on the southern slope.

Death occurred on April 17, 2026. That night, a hunter and his assistant secretly slaughtered a wild boar in the forest, loaded it into their SUV, and abandoned the beast—now headless and turned into a threat—in the very spot where that little girl had first set foot on the ground.

“Birth and Death in the Mountain” is Alberto Odériz’s third exhibition at the NORDÉS gallery. Created entirely from the earth of the mountain itself, the sculptor subjects the raw material to the elements of time. It is a process he has called “gravity painting,” in which the wind, rain, sun, and human activity on the terrain shape the formless clay until it becomes the Perdón Mountain.

It will also be time that determines how long the imprint of that birth and this death will endure before both are erased by the action of the wind that moves everything, the rain that dissolves everything, the sun that burns everything, and the and gravity, which drags everything down.