"La Rana Africana" Painting

Portrait statement My interest for portraits is driven by my interest on people. People that I know or people I work with or simply people in general. I am attracted by the features that describe their faces , because every one of them describes an event in their lives. After so many years during my life time, of moving from one country to another, meeting people, changing friends, becoming a member of new communities and creating new family circles, THE PORTRAIT has become an essential part of my quotidian life. Is my way of recording emotions, situations, and history, of recognizing times in my life, important or not so. Portraits help me to reconnect with old stories, faces and places. All these years living as a foreigner in multiple countries looking for my truly identity as a painter, I finally realize that is around the portrait that I can connect with a lost or forgotten part of my history, my family history, my friends history. In a way is like reconnecting with my inner self. Paintings from the back Painting people from the back presents a momentary pause/ void to the person' s identity, which is left to the viewer to construct. Otherwise whom the person is about remains a mystery. Somewhat concealed by the lack of information, it restricts the viewer from anything else that is more apparent, except for the hints to who the person is. Like from details from the belt, the pant cut, the brush "˜ modulations, the colors and most of all the composure. Everything is limited to the perimeter of the sitter, as if it is a symbol; like traffic symbols, they have a one dimensional representation. My paintings from the back are not about people turning their head from live or any given situation, actually they are looking at it. It is like when we are on a situation when somebody calls everybody's attention to look at something in the distance and everybody turns their body towards the event to look at. Everybody is giving their backs to each other but actually they all are looking at the same thing together.