The forest is more than deep and unknown; I usually go into its depths on autumn afternoons especially. It is a mysterious and seductive entity. Tremendously inexplicable, of false appearances, misleading visions and an illusory stillness that hides behind it, if anything, all the hustle and bustle of a collective subconscious.

Yolanda Tabanera is one of the inhabitants of the forest, she is born continuously from its depths; she is simultaneous, elusive and expansive. The first time I saw her I was immobilized by the astonishment for a few eternal seconds, because I saw her as an ethereal giant walking among the trees; she was a little more than three and a half meters tall, but she did not stop appearing to be delicate and light. I dared to tell her, even to shout at her (at a distance sufficient to prevent her from hearing me, I confess) that her works seemed to be the daughters of a great rhizomatic goddess. I don’t know if he heard me, since he didn’t even turn around to look at me, but I can sense that he wouldn’t take away my reason.

Tabanera is not a woman, I can assure you… She speaks in a strange archaic language, of a civilization that may have disappeared. She is a daimon that concentrates all the qualities of a good daimon: those tensions caused by a happy encounter between opposite extremes, but that in the fusion with her being form a terribly sublime silhouette.

Days before I met her, I discovered in the densest and most imbricated area of the same forest, a large camouflaged cave full of objects and unlikely beings. Surprised, I realized that I was in a sort of womb-attorney, where her new spectral creations, her new creatures, were being conceived.

Yolanda Tabanera is a cooperator of Mother Nature, or at least of that (her) forest. Her work starts from the inexplicable, from the very “soul of the world”. Her work is patient, she creates another reality that is categorical, telluric, seductive and dangerous; always subject to an initiatory and ultimately cathartic spirit.

His mysterious work develops a game of spectral projections, where the essence of a great cosmogonic organ unfolds (perhaps to infinity) in a quantity of forms that refer to its own origin, and to its own end.

I still don’t know if Yolanda Tabanera is a daimon creator of spectral objects or a goddess creator of daimons. Her creature-works refer us to the mystical and tribal fetish. The intimate and the strange merge in them, as well as the human and the divine, the partial and the universal…

Abysmal matrices. Carnivorous flowers. Burning lands. The breath of the great mother earth structures the warp of her best totem-pieces. The voices of her beings whisper cacophonous drawings in my memory as I leave the forest; they repeat mantras of another religion that I feel I will never fully know.