First published in Northern Spy: A Journal of Literature and the Arts, Issue 29, Finger Lakes Community College, New York, USA, 2026
In search for the light, ash, charcoal, fumage technique and acrylic paint on paper, 27,5 x 37,7cm, 2026, Private Collection
Everlasting Flowers series.
For their realization, shades of saturated colors were selected in contrast to the use of charcoal, ash, and traces of smoke produced by real flame. The latter remain suspended between their literal identity, as materials in and of themselves, and their poetic potential, which they acquire within the framework of what we call painting. They were applied to the surface in such a way as to function as means of pictorial representation and projection, while at the same time continuing to exist as presences. That is, as entities distinguished by their inherent qualitative formal characteristics, named and semantically activated as signs.
The indexicality of these materials, as well as the spectrum of associations they carry through their conjunction, converge upon the idea of combustion and the loss of forms, particularly when one observes those areas of the works where the paper has been entirely consumed by fire. There, the limits of this pictorial language, as well as the limits of the material itself, reveal a paradox: they exist in order to attest to their own absence, while simultaneously elevating the adjacent saturated colors into a condition of resistance.
The forms are detached from the real objects to which they refer. They have now become transmuted representations of a fiction, pictorially crystallized between fragmentation and wholeness. The flowers seem to stand amaranthine within their own world, and as symbols within ours.