23 Painting

SUBJECTS My vision focuses on the human element and uses portraiture as a medium to develop a narrative of individuals. For this reason, most of my work deals with the concept of self-discovery: both of oneself (using mask, makeup and costumes) and others (relationships, separations and memories). Therefore, my subjects often have something unpolished and teen. They go back looking for parts of themselves that have remained incomplete or they live a moment of loneliness with dramatic intensity. They struggle with self-identity and sometimes compare themselves to others. Very often they feel they are victims of a certain hormonal euphoria and a little disappointment. They are wonderfully unstable people seeking to shape themselves. They are fragments that I use to explore my contradictions and my concerns. For a long time my work has focused on the concept of masculinity and questioning the status quo. I will continue to do so, because we still live in a society that defends a concept of masculinity that is ridiculous, obsolete and harmful. I consider figurative painting as a political instrument. STYLE More than a naturalistic style, I would define my painting as synthetic. Each canvas is a construction of the image from a carefully decontextualized set of photographic material. Most of this material is self-produced, while the rest comes from private collections or historical archives. In each piece, I like the challenge of creating a different balance between control and abstract: in some paintings I try to do a faithful reproduction while in others I give priority to the movement of the paintbrush, turning faces and bodies into a sum of spots to awaken some emotional attention from the spectator. COLOURS There is something fascinating about photographs from the 80s: those shady areas where colors have gradually given way to blue. Since I started painting I have tried to reproduce that effect by exaggerating shadows and edges. Little by little, I have added to the blue a fairly complex range of colors, always having as a reference, the aesthetics of the 80s. Today I consider color my personal terrain of exploration of the contemporary. Without giving up that blue – an almost generational sign – I look for chromatically complex compositions. In my latest pieces I have devoted much attention to yellow and pink, colors that very often represent naivety and also decadence.