Works 2003 – 2010

Schopenhauer once said that painting should strive to acquire knowledge of an object as if it were not a concrete thing, but a Platonic idea, that is, knowledge of the eternal form of things belonging to the same category. In this sense, when I visually process a portrait I focus on its psychological characteristics. These do not belong only to the specific person depicted, but to all those where these same characteristics constitute a similar psychological portrait, a common expression, the eternal form.

The ability of a portrait to convey knowledge about a person’s characteristics is due to the fact that the brain, with its recorded experiences, associates specific characteristics with specific mental states and psychological traits (Zeki, 2013). The essential characteristic that gives direct knowledge about the person depicted is their expression. I don’t care who owns the portrait and how faithful it is to the reference person. What I’m looking for is the eternal form, that particular expression that I capture and that could eventually be applied to every face.

My main tool is the camera that freezes the expression and which I then edit digitally before it ends up on the canvas. This treatment is based on the deconstruction of the image into multiple tonal and color forms, referring to the multiple stimuli that contribute to facial expression, all of which are mixed in our ego and are imprinted on our face. The form is structured through the composition of irregular blobs in both color and shape. Each has a different color content and while it contains color “noise”, from a certain viewing distance it leaves a specific color impression (optical mixing). Thus, the drastic intervention in the scale of the portraits is applied with the intention of decisively affecting the visual understanding of the work in relation to the viewing distance.