Portraying myself: notes for a biography in progress
Talking about myself is inevitably talking about the places that inhabit me. I cannot conceive of my path —personal or creative— apart from the surroundings that shaped me. I come from places saturated with stimuli: smells that mix, noises that compete, human presences that overlap without rest. The sea, near or imagined, has always been there as a living border; the city, with its uneven rhythms and everyday wear, was my first mirror.
I understood early on that the face is not just a surface but a territory. My hands —stained with work, attempts and mistakes— have witnessed a process that never followed a straight line. I trained myself through self-teaching, insistent observation and the need to practise again and again, combining formal studies with workshops, mentoring and lessons that came more from human exchange than from established programmes. Each step was a form of slow healing, like the processes that need time and patience to reach their right point.
I was never interested in comfortable formats or predictable solutions. Large format soon appeared as an inevitable, almost physical challenge, where the body enters into direct dialogue with the work. In that confrontation a constant emerged: the face. Not as a closed identity, but as a battlefield. Each image was, and still is, an attempt to understand my own states, reactions, fractures and projections as an individual within a complex and often hostile social reality.
Over the years my work began to circulate in solo and group exhibitions, places I did not experience as goals but as stations in transit. Each show marked a moment in my emotional biography: the skin as a border, waiting as conflict, a gaze turned upwards in search of meaning, silence —imposed or chosen— as a defence. Some of those experiences exceeded other people’s expectations; for me, all of them were necessary.
I have taken part as a maker, as a juror and as a critical observer of the art scene around me. Even so, I have never stopped feeling in process. At an age when crises, ruptures and redefinitions tend to gather, I understood that my work could not be separated from an ethical stance: taking on creation as an exercise of responsibility, social questioning and intimate resistance.
From that stance comes what I have called Self-portraitism. Not as a closed aesthetic category, nor as a narcissistic repetition of the self, but as a critical tool. Portraying myself means examining myself, taking myself apart and putting myself back together through my bonds with others, my uprootings, my misfits and my aspirations. I am not interested in empty existentialism; I am interested in the human being crossed by their time: vulnerable, unfinished, contradictory.
My work is, in essence, a gallery of states. Faces that do not seek to please, but to question. Surroundings charged with anguish and, at the same time, with a stubborn hope. In every image beats the need to restore ourselves, to save something of ourselves before the mirror stops giving back a recognisable gaze. Perhaps that is why I keep working: because I have not yet finished finding my face, and because I know that, in that search, others discover themselves too.
