Wine as paint

Alfonso Aguirre’s wine paintings begin with making the paint itself. He works with sediment and concentrated residues drawn from exceptional Spanish red wine produced at Bodegas Torremilanos in Aranda de Duero. Through reduction, controlled heat, filtration and concentration, the wine is transformed into a pigment-rich medium that can be manipulated in a manner similar to watercolour. Natural earth pigments and other studio elements are introduced, creating a material whose final composition remains particular to each work.

Each painting receives its own preparation of paint, which is discarded when the work is complete. The process is part chemistry, part alchemy and part studio practice; it cannot be entirely standardised. Every batch carries the physical history of the material from which it began.

There is also a temporal dimension. Before reaching the studio, the substance has passed through soil, vine, fruit, fermentation and maturation. Painting continues that transformation. The resulting works are made not merely with wine, but from it: wine becomes pigment, material and provenance — a physical trace of the vineyard and the landscape from which it came.