Workshop Museum
Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer
Walking down a narrow street in Santa Lucía Milpas Altas, one arrives at Juan Carlos Mencos’ workshop. A dog always greets me there. The scent of wood can be sensed from the street itself. The “introductory text” to this workshop-museum is an open-air storage area filled with hundreds of wood scraps, serving as a preamble. The museum lies within a woodworking shop.
Juan Carlos Mencos is neither a carpenter nor a cabinetmaker. Carpentry turned him into an artist. The moment he finds, selects, adapts, repairs, collects, and curates the remnants in his workshop, he names these pieces of wood as artworks.
The works were born long before he ever found them. They emerged as fragments that accumulated on their own over time. Only later does he baptize, repair, and compose them as artistic pieces. They sculpted themselves despite his gaze. His hands — and those of his carpenters — shaped them through exercises in figure and ground, an exercise in Gestalt. While furniture is being built, its remnants become artworks. At first, they are merely background.
Juan Carlos is an accumulator, a collector of scraps. His museum exists outdoors, outside his workshop. Among the remnants, he rummages, selects, then organizes them, and there his process begins. Yet the wooden pieces had already been organized since the seed of the tree itself. Some of those seeds are older than Juan Carlos, meaning the works were born even before he was.
He always mentions the species of tree. Juan Carlos speaks with the trees before taking their wood, and this becomes evident in the way he refers to the pieces using pronouns: she or he. They are never things; they are beings inhabiting the space outside his home.
He understands their value through their origins. One can sense his excitement when he encounters a piece from the hormigo tree and speaks of the marimba. It is for this reason that one of the works in the exhibition includes sound. Working with wood possesses certain qualities that, in the language of poets, would become deeply evocative images. Wood is alive, and Juan Carlos speaks of how this must be considered when shaping it. A poet remains alert to the images that can be captured from the world. Juan Carlos fishes for the ideas behind his sculptures by listening to the wood. He is obsessed with the densities of each species, as though these were the personalities of rosul, pine, cypress, and conacaste.
Each piece in this body of work forms part of a vast forest, which Juan Carlos has graciously brought closer to us, translating its language so that we, too, may enter into dialogue with it.