Pablo Garcia Lopez: The Cortical Garden

"Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly coloured butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, the beating of whose wings may someday -who knows?- clarify the secret of mental life" - Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Recollections of My Life.

My work as an artist is directly inspired by my experience as a neuroscientist. I completed my PhD in conjunction with the Museum Cajal, working with the original slides and scientific drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934). Besides being completely astonished by the historical and current neuroscientific concepts, and esthetics of his histological slides, drawings, articles, and books, I was impressed by the great abundance of metaphors that he employed in his scientific writings. Possibly, even more impressive concerning Cajal’s metaphors are their naturalistic and organic essence. Many of these metaphors could be considered rhetorical ornaments, although they also function as explanatory and even as heuristic tools for proposing his models and theories about brain functioning. - Pablo Garcia Lopez, Sculpting the brain