Manifesto I: The Word Reveals the Image (2018-2020)
Reality is overrated and fantasy is underestimated. I believe that the richest things in life are fiction and the power of imagination. My photography is loaded with theatrical and cinematic gestures that allude to both pictorial and documentary archives. Ace a result, my work has become an exercise in sinister freedom led to its strangest consequences. A freedom that has a strong relationship with chance and instinct. I try to use all the narrative tools at my disposal to create emotion within imperfection. It is an affront to terror and dehumanization because human passion itself is challenging. I enjoy playing to living, sometimes I win and sometimes I fail. In my work I integrate different elements such as archive images, pictorial intervention, make-up, collage, toy and professional cameras, among others.
The texts that come with my work are inspired by raw moments of extreme detachment written amid madness and total clarity (flashbacks). In my stories I try to create a flexible plot that goes to the encounter with my personal, human, cultural and social demons. This for me is a way of self- determination where I test my interlocutors by presenting them against intrigue, fetishism, perversion, truth, lies, arrogance, love, illusion, human irrationality, irony, talent for self-destruction and capacity for self-deception. I create images from the depths of my artistic ability to produce narrative experiences for the spectator. Each composition tells a story about the self-referential characters that I place in my projects which reflect my state of mind and my feelings. There is a desire to devour reality and to surpass it, because I believe that where there is pride there is no fantasy.
My references are Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Darren Arronofsky, Lars Von Trier, Chuck Palahniuk, Jacques Derrida, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Alejandro Jodorowsky, F.W. Murnau, Truman Capote, Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman, Matthew Barney, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Paganini, Roman Polanski, David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, William Burroughs, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Teresa Margolles, Charles Bukowski, William Blake, Francis Bacon, Melanie Klein Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, José Luis Borges, James Joyce, André Breton, Octavio Paz, David Lynch, Gabriel García Márquez, Marco Polo, Samuel Becker, Gabriel Orozco, Emmanuel Lubezky, Francis Ford Coppola, Franz Kafka, Sophie Calle, Alfonso Cuarón, Chan-Wook Park, Alejandro González Iñaritu and Guillermo del Toro; the Kabuki theater, the Dada movement, the Viennese performance, German expressionism, Ero guro, non-fiction, the crime novel and the myriad frequencies of the subculture, among others.
I disclose a transgressive and irreverent aesthetic search located somewhere between the odd and the everyday, the built and the accidental, the discovered and the sought, the accidental and the planned, the lived and the imagined, being subtle, terrifying, seductive and bewitching at the same time. I aim to discuss the roughness, the subtleness, the complexity and the emotion of living outside the box, thus illustrating my existential, mystical and psychic journey.
My intention is to tell stories that explore the visual, cultural and emotional depiction of gender and identity, and the potential conflict between both of them. The resulting pieces raise questions and make statements about the manifestations of the body and the psychological and emotional conflicts arising from the imposition of a social and cultural identity. I suspect that no matter how far we progress as individuals or civilizations economically, technologically or culturally, humankind is instinctive, savage, fragile, emotional and destructive. My images convey powerful sensations and embody the fleeting nature of life and death pulsations. This strength emerges in my photographs because it is an important element in the way I set up my ideology. The portraits also express this creative energy, using the body as a canvas for aberrations, anomalies, subsistence, deaths and florid forms of punishment as a treatment for the soul. The concepts
that I work in lead the viewer to intimate moments where the figure of the subject is the only emotionally expressive element that we can glimpse. The body, the blood and the matter that shapes us are portrayed.
My work seek to address the intimate connections that people have with their own feelings, thoughts, perceptions of gender, sexuality, place in society, identity and mortality. These are ideas that anyone can engage with. Every human being is able to identify with the possession of a body, its desires, and their pursuit of identity (or many identities) on the spectrum set up by our culture, family, and society, but urgently anxious for independence. The true identity of my characters lies deep within, beneath pictorial fluids, parasites, blankets and ultimately skin. I try to capture the facade of the psyche in a philosophical way and even in a scientific sense, which transcends the religion of each of these people, while they make expressions of their personality. I am fascinated by the belief that none of these entities are victims because all represent their own perversion. The surrender of each subject is dramatic and in conjunction with the light chosen to creat the image generates the doubt in the viewer if what he is observing is a photograph with movement or cinema in a state of freezing. The subjects masters how to play their enigmatic, expressive and extremely creative roles. There are some of my images where the subject look directly at the viewer but when it happens, he does so with a sense of vulnerability and openness. In the rest of the pictures, the viewer looks at the scenes from the outside, without recognition or attention. Then the viewer becomes a voyeur, observing situations that he assumes as personal and private. My stories relate a wealth of visual texture, color, contrast and drama that recreate metaphors of enchantment, mystery, experience and curiosity about what may be hidden underneath: the human psyche, the metamorphic process of life and the understanding that life is bigger than anyone. Nothing is perfectly defined or permanent. Humans have always migrated and survived. Humans have endured and transformed themselves and their circumstances into something new during their journey between birth and death. As a result we learn to use many masks in order to survive. We learn how to adapt to our environment and we fight for our right to express who we are and what we are capable of.
I am especially interested in accurately portraying my state of mind through my characters and settings. They all express beauty, mystery and a deep creative struggle that affects my topics! To me nothing is completely finished, everything is chasing and lurking around my next work. I use metaphors and symbols that are visually appealing and my background serves to establish a strong, honest and changing composition. A palette of luminous and pictorial tonality seems to represent unconsciously my pursuit of capturing the magic that color can communicate at a psychological level. In particular with the use of mustard yellow and lime green I create gloomy but luminous scenes that frame the subjects. The way I use lights and shadows to describe the entities in the images produces visual tension. As strange as it is, I imagine that I have managed to reproduce at the same time enigmas and a feeling of welcome, both individually and as a group of images. I am not a photographer, but photography and I use each other to make art. I believe in art beyond the areas and paradigms designed by critics and art historians.
That is the reason why I dynamite when producing photobooks where the utopian and dystopian fiction of the image overflows without apparent rest, regulation, order or style, nor happy endings. That is the reason why I print in large and tiny dimensions in the same exhibition project. I want to inspire reactions of astonishment by creating a sense of scale for the spectator. I believe that the presentation of large formats makes the viewer feel small when is faced with the possibility of standing in front of these intriguing statements about gender and identity, while the tiny pieces whisper to those who pay attention to them the shred of a secret. I encourage the audience to be exposed to the feeling of being immersed in unexpected scenarios, allowing them to contemplate the possibility of interpreting what they see. In my series “The Rage of Devotion” and in my subsequent works I open my practice to thinking about the perversion and needlessness of social structures (family, religion, state, among others) describing them as I experienced them: an inbred curse in the context of Mexican witchcraft. In my experiments “Blood Orange” and “Too Strong for Fantasy” I explore the consequences of the perpetration of violence against women. I also explore notions such as the accident, the fake healings, the exile, the punishment and the journey of hatred. While in “The Perversion of Illusion” which is composed by “Water of Fire” and “Tiger’s Milk”, as in “The Witch Stage” and in “I Am Not a Map, I Am a Labyrinth”, I trace my adult and child defense mechanisms. Through these works I talk about sexualized trauma, cultural war against the feminine, fragility, Stockholm syndrome and Electra’s complex, love, deception, traps, games, exchange, adventure and emotional illiteracy. I speak of learning to abandon without feeling pain as a declaration of honesty and freedom to the extent of breaking with myself.
