SOME IMPORTANT PEOPLE & FRIENDS
DRAWINGS, INK ON PAPER, 2007 - IN PROGRESS


The Ecuador of my work is this project based in drawings of unknow people, made of ink on paper, is simple but a very deep work for me. There is no doubt that our first intention with this series of portraits will be to look for somebody we know, to make out a feature to make it easier to define who it is or why has he or she been immortalized in the artwork. But there is no answer. Among these characters, there is no relation with reality. It is at that moment, when the truth or, better said, the lie is discovered, that this work comes to life.

Using the portrait as a way of representation, the intention of this work is to show the other, a difference that puzzles us, especially here, since it is disturbing not to be able to distinguish who the one in the portrait is. They are the portraits of nobody, the portraits of no one and maybe of someone at the same time. I could stick to the typical sentence warning us that any similarity with reality is a mere coincidence, but the interesting factor is to be able to play with that possible familiarity, the uncertain feeling when we find these people who are not supposed to exist, faces that we come across on the street, with whom we eventually share a train car, or people we forget we have ever even met. These ghosts seem to take over, guiding the sure and conclusive strokes of the pen on the paper, specters of the imagination mixed with the memories, which take us to the way of the unheimlich, the way of the sinister.

"Some Important People & Friends" is the Freudian paradigm of the sinister. What seems to be familiar and intimate becomes the opposite. The portraits are at the same time close to us, possible, real, proposed trough the title… but after the first impression, they become disturbing, sinister and unreal. Their non-existence is what disrupts our idea of the portrait as a kind of memory of a loved one in the first place, it disrupts the idea to keep the memory of the face of somebody we like to keep close live in our mind. But that idea only keeps alive an inexistent memory, so our objective is not fulfilled, and that fear makes those portraits become the expression of the sinister, as I said, and disrupts the way we appreciate realism: the details of the gestures, the poses and even the clothes show us a link with reality. That is what keeps them recognizable to a certain extent, and, although we are not able to identify them individually, we recognize ourselves in the whole of the work.

We recognize the difference we want to expose and we confront it in the mirror portrayed here. The paradox of this series of portraits is based on the paradox of the sinister itself, where the source of fear is not what is strange in opposition to what is familiar to us. On the contrary, what was familiar at the beginning becomes threatening and, at the same time, refers to something that we know but that has always been hidden, in the shadow.


Back