No. 1 Painting

I like to keep my studio nice and tidy. I always clean up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much an upbringing thing, a family thing. Cleanliness, economy, order and organization are a big machine of which I’m the catalyst. But the inmediacy of words as a subversive conceptual project parallels my own artistic practice. The accidental attempt of hiding the words beneath the canvas conveys a subtle violence of graffiti-like defacement, rich incidents of dripping, skipping, or distortion that corrupt the reading of the word. The meaning of the word speaks directly to my own experiences but also to a wider audience. Nevertheless, it’s an almost arbitrary choice before it’s applied with spray paint. I begin with a roll of unprimed, raw canvas, the width of which defines the width of the painting, which I then stretch over a wooden stretcher. A wash of powdered pigments mixed with an acrylic polymer is applied to the entire surface of the canvas, in effect dying the pigments into the canvas. This becomes the background of the painting; the canvas continues past the edges of the stretcher bar. The background is then painted with oil paint thinned with turpentine; whole eggs and unbounded pigments are mixed with the diluted oil paint. Dirt is then either thrown or rubbed at the surface, endowing it of a texture and/or color. Dirt is free and everywhere, eggs are cheap and everywhere. They are democratic, an extension of a romanticized reality. I sit sometimes for hours or days, in front of the canvas, considering the next move or contemplating the shape of a particular area. The actual painting, however, is done very rapidly, in the manner of an automatic technique adopted from the surrealists. I discontinued the practice of giving narrative titles to the paintings, they are referred only by number and year.