The creative process of Jairo Llano: Photographs that Capture Sculpture and Time
For some time now, I’ve been conversing with artificial intelligence, seeking a reflection of who I am by asking it somewhat forcibly about myself and my work. Recently, I worked with it to create an interview that would help me understand myself and share my artistic process with others.
This is the interview conducted by the Language Agent, with my responses—free and unpretentious. I leave this excerpt here to build together the imagery of Jairo Llano.
Question 1: How would you describe your work and artistic process at this point in your career?
I work with photography. Lately, I’ve become obsessed with time—what slips through our fingers without us being able to control it, the time I spend doing things, the time I capture in a photograph of temporary paper sculptures, that in-between point of what is and what is missing.
Question 2: How has the evolution of technology influenced your artistic practice?
The photography of the everyday has remained constant, things around me, whether they’re sculptural elements in architecture or ephemeral elements in architecture, like sunlight coming into a space, all the way to my most recent work, which involves paper sculptures that would fade away if not for their photographic capture. I’ve changed scale, moving from landscapes and architecture to the objects and elements I can control in an artist’s studio. I’ve moved from camera to phone to make my records, leaving behind the advertising technique to make the emotional impulse of creating a work and capturing it more evident with whatever I have available when making a piece.
On the other hand, language, words, phrases, and poetry have always been present, but I hadn’t included them in my work until now. I feel that these phrases should now be part of the body of work of an artist who thinks, reflects, overthinks, and philosophizes about many things around them.

Question 3: How important is philosophical reflection in your work?
It’s the most important thing. Although I try to create more freely, it’s always a reflection that sparks the start of a project. For example, in Loading Pixels (https://www.jairoallano.com/loadingpixels), I had a question about what photography means in the digital age and what it meant to cut time within a computational language. Then the reflection leads to the series, with which I try to create many variations on the same theme in order to collect aesthetic exercises that are anchored in philosophical reflection. I believe in the world of images as metaphors for reality.
Question 4: Why did you choose photography as a medium for your artistic work?
I chose photography because of my love for it. It seems like that conceptual space where you store the things that get lost, its archival nature, its connection with others, and because it seems instant. Time and light are essential, but so are the objects photographed, the landscape, the architecture, the objects around me in my studio, papers I collect, old books, dictionaries or maps, as well as coffee cups left forgotten for days in my studio, or elements of nature I find on the ground—fallen wet flowers, dry branches, dried flowers, etc.
Question 5: Which other artists have influenced your work and how?
A few years ago, I saw an exhibition about Zoe Leonard at the Reina Sofía Museum. I really connected with her series about New York, especially the one with the fences encapsulating trees. I also love Tara Donovan’s sculptures and Taryn Simon’s photographic series. During my studies, the Düsseldorf school of photography had a strong influence on me, and in architecture, I admire the visual weight of Barragán’s work, as well as the poetic nature of Álvaro Siza’s buildings. I think since my youth, Duchamp’s presence was a lightbulb moment that changed the way I saw and understood the world, and at that time, I thought of collage as an objective space. I’m also interested in museums because of the impact they have—the white cube, but also the almost religious aura of their spaces, places for personal encounters.
Question 6: How do you see your work in relation to the current art context?
Pff, that seems much more difficult to me. While I see a great local artistic movement speaking about politics and society, I believe my work is very personal, almost labyrinthine in my own self. In fact, taking photos of temporary sculptures is an exercise that I believe has no name, because, as contemporary photography, it’s not clear if it’s the record of a work that is sculpture or if it is sculpture itself immortalized… it’s a very in-between place. I see contemporary art being more electronic, more belligerent, and I know that is not the position of my work.
Question 7: How do you see the future of your work? What are your long-term goals?
It is a conceptual work that connects personal points and represents metaphors about my identity in the world around me, something that is fearful and perhaps wants to be discovered, as if the curator and the viewer must be interested to find the heart of the work and connect intimately with it.
Question 8: What new goals or challenges do you want to take on within your artistic practice?
I would like to find a path toward public sculpture. Whether temporary or permanent, it seems that breaking down the barriers of the studio, the computer, social networks, and the gallery could allow me to think out loud, so to speak, shouting to the world artistically about what is not communicated with words, but rather through the aesthetic of art. It would allow me to connect architecture, art, philosophy, and reflections—probably in a less solitary exercise, with a team of other people with whom we can articulate our ideas.
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