ABout the Artist
"From the beginning, my work has been a reflection on the look. How do we construct our internal experience of a couple of eyes fixedly staring at us? How are the shadows, brilliance and all implicit geography within each photograph interpreted and elaborated inside of us?
If the way we look is concocted from the social and cultural, we may conclude that all looks are political and all artistic production is subject to this kind of judgment. The glance as power... In my artistic process I have tried to create images that invite the observer to examine by means of what I call “emotional contemplation”; assigning, through the beauty in them, the meaning of their shape.
... Portraits in which the loneliness and yet emotional firmness of the subjects could be sensed and in which the glance established a space of contradictions and ambiguities. In this series of portraits, mainly of Guatemalans, the countenance served as a mirror in which I looked at myself, wondered and searched for meaning. In those portraits, the strength of the glance lies on the power it has to reverse my own and this power reaches its most intense value if it manages to reverse the spectator’s as well... To the observer, to discover himself in this internal, silent glance, accompanied by this immobile countenance that stares back at him, means to become aware that we all share a common destiny. A reflection on beauty as fragility, memory as pain and time as a continuous fall.
... this work is an intimate and very personal attempt at shaping the ghosts that rule personal relationships, religious hierarchies; well, shaping all those that rule politics and life." - Luis Gonzalez Palma