Signature Collection
Canto
The pilón arrived in the Americas as knowledge, not as cargo — carried by the African diaspora from the seventeenth century onward, a hollowed trunk and a heavy wooden pestle used to strip the husk from maize, rice, coffee and cacao. In Colombia it stood in the yard of nearly every rural house until electric mills replaced it. The work belonged to women, done before dawn, two of them facing each other, alternating the fall of a four-kilo mano so the pestles would never meet. Out of the effort came song — work songs built on the rhythm of the arm, the breath falling with the blow.
Everything about the object was subtraction. It is made by hollowing a trunk. It is used by hollowing itself further, one strike at a time, so its final shape was never fully decided by the hand that began it. Wood removed to make it. Wood removed to use it.
This one was found, not made. Lascaux drew a new surface for it and carved it: flowers, a bird, a turned stem, a base opening in petals.
The first material it ever received instead of lost.
What remains is neither tool nor ornament. The function is gone — nothing will be pounded here again — but the gesture stays, held in the marks of the gouge and in the cracks the wood earned before anyone thought to draw on it.
Dimensions
H 80 cm × Ø 44 cm (mouth) · 31.5 × 17.3 in
Weight
70 kg · 154 lb
Materials
Solid wood
Application
Sculptural object. Floor, plinth or console. No longer functional — not for food preparation. / Objeto escultórico. Piso, pedestal o consola. Sin uso funcional — no apto para alimentos.
The Making Of
The drawing came after. A surface was designed for a body that already had its own geometry — the swell of the bowl, the narrowing at the waist, the round foot. The relief follows that form rather than covering it: flowers gather where the bowl is widest, a bird crosses the point of greatest curve, the stem takes a turned pattern, the base opens in petals.
Carving into old wood is not carving into new wood. It is dry, harder in places, and it splits where it has already decided to split. The drawing had to give way to the material more than once. Every gouge mark was left visible — the surface is faceted, not polished, so the hand that made the relief stays legible next to the wear that came before it.