A founding paradox
The Witness starts from an apparent contradiction: using the most individual gesture there is, the self-portrait, to examine the collective ills of our time. What might look like narcissism is, on closer inspection, the opposite: an attempt for the personal self to become a social self, and for the self-portrait to stop being a mirror and become a window.
The project sets out to make a thousand self-portraits in ten years. In them the self is not shown off, but appears as a bare subject crossed by the social and economic crises that have marked me since childhood, and by the saturation of the digital self: life lived as content rather than as experience.
Why a thousand
The number is not a matter of quantity but of principle. While the selfie celebrates the fleeting, The Witness proposes the series as a critical method.
A thousand is an intentional saturation: repeating the self-portrait mirrors digital saturation, but with a purpose; where social media creates chaos, the series imposes order, and where it produces anxiety, it proposes contemplation.
A thousand is a crowd born from a single person: dig deep enough into one self and an us appears.
And a thousand is a ritual: ten years in which each self-portrait is a station on the same path.
The self-portrait as a critical tool
Serial self-portraiture has precedents, from Frida Kahlo’s visual diaries to Cindy Sherman’s constructed identities. What is specific to Self-portraitism is not the medium but the starting point: a real self, not a character, placed at the service of a collective question.
Each face questions selfie culture and shows what it hides: time, vulnerability, the trace of experience. Against the perfect snapshot, work that is made slowly; against the filter, the rawness of the process.
In an age of attention crisis, the proposal is both simple and countercurrent: to look at ourselves more, not less, and to do so in depth. Who are we behind the thousands of faces we show the world? What remains human when we strip away the layers of performance?
From the face to the space
Self-portraitism is an open field of research, not a closed style. Its first stage is the face, repeated and transformed in The Witness. The next one starts from a question: can a self-portrait exist without directly depicting the artist’s body?
The hypothesis is that the self also shows itself in objects, spaces, memories and relationships. That is why painting expands into installation: booths and confessionals in which self-representation passes from the artist to the viewer, who steps into the work and meets their own presence.
Beyond painting
Self-portraitism was born in painting, but its root is shared by every art: the urge to bear witness to human experience. In literature it is critical autofiction; in sculpture and architecture, the self made matter and habitable space; in music, sound memory; in dance, the body as a self-portrait in motion; in film and theatre, the author who includes himself in the work and the actor who becomes a mirror of the audience.
It does not impose a technique, but an ethical principle: to create is not to represent, but to bear witness.
The risks I take on
The risk of turning inward: every work must stay anchored to a question that challenges whoever looks at it.
The risk of repetition: a thousand works demand visible evolution, the capacity to surprise and growing depth.
And the market paradox: criticising the commodification of the self within a system that sells works. I do not hide it. Every work, print and piece that leaves the studio sustains the next of the thousand; the integrity of the project depends on not being absorbed by the logic it criticises.
The open door
Self-portraitism is not a closed territory or a rigid school: it is a path that is always opening. Anyone who feels the need to record the flow of their identity and turn it into work —painters, performers, photographers, illustrators, digital artists— is invited to join this conversation.
It is not about following a canon. Entering is simple: you only have to decide that the self-portrait can be a journey, not a destination.
