Jairo Alfonso, 386, 2

Dear Abraham,

Gallery 8 New York opens in Harlem next Thursday with an inaugural exhibition 17 Cuban artists from FACTION Art Projects.

The exhibition, All That You Have Is Your Soul (Feb 2 – March 10) curated by Armando Marino and Meyken Barreto is a group show of 17 artists, all of whom are tied together by their responses to building identity within a foreign land. The exhibition uses the link of heritage between the artists to present artworks that celebrate difference in identity. Each artist in the show has some relationship to Cuba, some island-born emigres, some with careers developed in Cuba and others with more distant descendants. This starting point, a key point of identity for some, but not for others, offers a tangible bond in their linked roots, but the overriding premise is that as a group they mean to redefine themselves within their unique circumstance.

Artists exhibiting:

Alejandro Aguilera, Anthony Goicolea, Armando Mariño, Ariel Cabrera Montejo, Elsa Mora, Enrique De Molina, Ernesto Pujol, Geandy Pavon, Jairo Alfonso, Juan Carlos Quintana, Juan Miguel Pozo, Juana Valdes Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Marc Dennis, Maritza Molina, Marta Maria Perez, Pavel Acosta, Quisqueya Henriquez

Throughout the show FACTION will seek to engage with local communities of the Harlem neighborhood. This will include a series of School Workshops, Curators’ Talks, a Neighborhood Welcoming Day, Artist Workshops, Panel Discussions and a Cuban Cultural Evening.
FACTION provides artists with promotion and opportunity to access collectors and a wider audience, with all the support of a gallery but without the constraints of the traditional model. FACTION is a new flexible collective, from the team behind the hugely successful Gallery 8 and Coates & Scarry in London, who in this, their foray into the US, are adapting a unique model for artists and gallerists to work together.

All the very best,

Anna

Thanks and congratulation on a significant program and exhibit.

Abraham Lubelski

Editor / Publisher

Press Release

Geandy Pavon, Wrinkled Wing, 201

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Abortion is our country’s Scarlet Letter, an impassioned “A” writ large on our conscience. We shame, blame and deny women their right to self-determination to live, love and when to have or not have children. Although this January is the 45th year anniversary of the Supreme Court Ruling legalizing abortion, there have been, as of last count, 401 rollbacks across the country making it very difficult, and in many cases impossible for women to elect this choice. What can we do about this?

We can march, write articles, sign petitions, hold direct actions We can invent related hashtags like #MeToo–what greater sexual harassment in there than defining what a woman can do with her body? And we can make art. But what might art about abortion look like? What might it accomplish? These are the questions Barbara Zucker explores in “Currents: Abortion” an ambitious exhibit she curated at the A.I.R. Gallery.

Barbara Zucker, artist, writer and activist, is a co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery, established in 1972 as the first not-for-profit, artist-directed and maintained gallery for women artists in the United States.

In my interview with her, Zucker said, “Abortion is talked and written about, but there’s not much art about it. It almost seems taboo. Several artists I approached to do an artwork said “’No’.”

This exhibit is a visual compendium and unfolding of the issues, stories, meanings, and history embedded in one word: Abortion. The 70 works selected from the over 160 submissions, are the artists’ response to a series of questions posed by Zucker.

In selecting the works, Zucker said that “I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I didn’t want the usual tropes of hangers, nor large amounts of blood. Nothing specific.” She want

ed works that were “thought provoking, reflecting different states of mind, speaking in different voices.”

Two of A.I.R.’s three galleries, entrance and back hall, are richly filled with works in a breathtaking range of mediums: paintings, drawings, prints, etchings, photographs, collage, sculpture, mixed-media constructions, and a monitor showing several videos. Zucker doesn’t seem to impose any apparent “ordering” of the work. All media, all viewpoints, views and experiences are exhibited together, demanding equal attention–a sisterhood of Me Too. The effect is that of “a visual conversation” representing all the varied experiences women have and have had regarding abortion This not a quiet exhibit. It fairly shouts at you—you hear the different visual voices, experiences, stories, cries and whispers of defiance, anger, pain, sadness, longing, shame, regret, outrage __”the full catastrophe”.

Zucker believes this show is an opportunity for us to listen to artists who have chosen to give voice to their “emotions and perceptions about this subject. You will find depictions of choice, loss, and anger; of fecundity, of disease. There are images of helplessness and images of power. There is work that reaches into the past to demonstrate ways in which women used abortifacients. There is work that is pro-life as well as work that is religious.”

She observes that those who are pro-choice are as passionate as those who are not. “I believe all of us are pro-life: it is the definition of the term that is not the same. Herein lies the dilemma. How do we ever bridge this divide?”

Though much has been written about abortion, there has

not been much visual art. Through this exhibit, Zucker hopes to get people to see the visual and have it be as important as the words. Art, she believes, is a powerful bridge that can engender a kind of “visual dialogue.”

Barbara Zucker’s introduction to the exhibit profoundly states that “Art is visual listening.” She continues with “We use all of our senses to listen and to understand. In this turbulent moment in history, the ability to listen to one another has become a matter of urgency.” “Currents: Abortion” reflects these complexities and is larger than pro and con, yes and no. It goes to the heart of who we are and how we want to be as individuals and as a nation. This exhibit shows us how the personal is political.

Indira Cesarine ACT NOW

Yael Ben-Zion: Photograph Detail 2017 Cemetry at Trinity Church “In Loving Memory of All The Victims of Abortion”

Rosa Naparstek      January 22, 2018

 ____________________________________________________

Participating artists:

Adrienne Jenkins, Alexander Bernon, Amy Cannestra, Amy Finkbeiner, Anne Ferrer, Audrey Anastasi, Bernadette Despujols, Cali Kurlan, Catherine Hall & Meg Lipke, Charlotte Woolf, Christophe Lima, Coco Hall, Cristin Millet, Cynthia Winika, d’Anne de Simone, Dani Sigler, Danielle Siegelbaum, Deborah Wasserman, Devra Fox, Divine Williams, Dottie Attie, Elaine Angelopoulos, Elke Solomon, Ellen Jong, Eugenia Pigassiou, Gina Randazzo , Grace Burney, Greta Young, Heather Saunders & Cassandra, Heather Weathers, Ilona Granet, Indira Cesarine, Irene Gennaro, Jane Zweibel, Jessica Nissen, Julia Kim Smith , Julia Buck, Justine Walker, Karen Meersohn, Kathy Grove, Katrina Majkut, Lannie Hart, Leslie Fry, Leslie Tucker, Megan Pickering, Marie Tomanova, Martha Edelheit, Martha Fleming Ives, Maureen Connor, Mira Schor, Nadine Faraj, Nancy Hellebrand, Nancy Lasar, Nina Meledandri, Parastoo Ahoon, Pat Lasch, Perri Nerri, Rachel Lindsay, Rachel Portesi, Robin Adsit, Robin Jordan, Robin Tewes, Rosemary Meza DesPlas, Ruth Owens, Sabra Moore, Sooyeon Yun, Susan Carr, Valerie Hallier, Virginia Carey, Yael Ben Zion

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Claudia Aguilar

The diversity of techniques and media used in Tiziano Fabris’ works makes its production complex to classify. If you asked him to characterize his work, he would answer without hesitation, “It’s totally useless.” It is precisely the number of symbols not outlined in that description that casts doubts on its banality. Passing along the entire artistic tradition and using any available technique, Fabris redefines himself in each work; in each step he disassembles his preceding point of view, deconstructing his own glance with the seriousness of a child that invents a new game when disarming his best toy. Always between Italy and Argentina, Fabris captures in his pictures the tension between those countries.

In his series Forbiche, back in 2004, he started working with the bonds that link European traditions with American countries. However, in a later exhibition, Extraño (Strange) in 2006, he approached that relationship by introducing a new character: the immigrant. To do so, Fabris worked with clothes that used to belong to some of those immigrants: some of them family, some of them friends. Absolutely independent, doing everything himself, Fabris used the clothes as his canvas. A mixture of intense colors and abstract paintings, they carry the powerful effect caused by the “broken” images: broken but still related, because a small part remained intact. From an outsider’s point of view, as a foreigner that chose to be an Argentine, these images come alive and tell their story.

Tiziano Fabris was born in Vicenza, Italy, in 1964. When he was eighteen years old he returned to Europe, visiting during a year Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia. There he had varied experiences: from the spiritual one, retiring himself in the Franciscan convent of Umbria, to the simple metropolitan survival sharing the illegality of marginal groups. He passed through intellectual research with students of the entire world during his studies of arts in the Scuola Internazionale di Graffica in Venice. Returning to Buenos Aires, he studied advertising. When he shipped again to Europe, he established himself in Italy, working freelance for graphic design agencies in Padua and Vicenza. During these times he began painting seriously. Today, at 44 years old, he studies Art History at the Buenos Aires University and works on building a personal artistic career.

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Boxbird Gallery

Small Wonders, a summer exhibition as well as her first Brighton solo show by the critically acclaimed illustrator Zara Wood, takes place at Boxbird Gallery. Wood’s unique style and character-based illustration has lent itself to a variety of successful campaigns with advertising, editorial, publishing, and fashion clients throughout Europe and Australia, including Stussy and Topshop. Alongside a stunning collection of limited-edition prints and original works, Wood’s greetings cards and printed products sell through many international galleries, including the V&A, London and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Small Wonders is set to transform Boxbird Gallery into a museum of imagination. Fascinated by the natural world and expeditions, Wood has always been inspired by collections from the New York Natural History Museum and the Pitts Rivers in Oxford. A young Zara could often be found making up epic adventure stories in the garden, stroking bumblebees, climbing trees, and adopting lost or stray animals. “Nature can be so fantastical in all its intricacies,” Wood says. “It’s the perfect context for drawing and letting your imagination run away with itself.” Using her trademark medium, Wood exhibits new cardboard dioramas encased in reclaimed display cases—reminiscent of museum collections and animation sets. For the first time ever, Wood will also be creating limited-edition screen-printed artworks on cardboard alongside new ink drawings and collage pieces.

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Valery Oisteanu reviews Unica Zürn: Dark Spring, on view at the Drawing Center earlier in July.

On opening night in the Drawing Center’s main gallery, a palpable vibration filled the room, where mostly artists, critics and art collectors converged to see a rare apparition—that of the “hallucinatory chimeras” of enigmatic German poet/artist Unica Zürn (1916-1970). The work, last shown at the ubu gallery in 2005, once again left a strong impression, the elusiveness and intricacy of Zürn’s nightmarish fantasies still potent almost four decades after her suicide at age 54.


Curator Joao Ribas culled several private collections to assemble the absorbing Dark Spring, an exhibit of unsettling and hypnotic drawings inked in the 1950s and 60s by Zürn while she was constantly battling mental illness. And yet, her art does not reflect her depression, but instead, offers delicate and exquisite visions and chimeras. Her few shimmering paintings are almost ephemeral, faded, with detailed biomorphic elements suggesting exotic flowers, birds, fish, and jellyfish, all seemingly in perpetual flotation. 


These 50 mostly untitled pieces are intricate and whimsical, prime examples of the surrealist technique of automatic drawing. They offer the viewer a fluid stream of subconscious desire as manifested in delicate, curly lines, smudged ink, twisting spirals that sometimes evolve into faces, and psychedelic creatures that curl in and out of patterned abstraction. 


In her novel, The Man of Jasmine, 1967, Zürn openly confesses: “All her life obsessed with faces, she draws faces. After an initial moment when the pen ‘swims’ hesitantly on the white paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another.” 


Zürn was employed as a scriptwriter at UFA, Germany’s national film company, and supposedly was oblivious to the horrors of Nazism until 1945, when by chance she heard an underground radio report about the concentration camps, a revelation that eventually led to her emotional and psychological collapse. During the 1950s, still in Berlin, Zürn wrote numerous expressionistic short stories, published in German newspapers, before moving to Paris with Hans Bellmer. During the following decade and a half, Zürn produced paintings and drawings, exhibiting with surrealist artists such as Henri Michaux, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Her hallucinations were often brought on by visions of Nazi atrocities, her guilt of being a German, and a series of harrowing abortions.


Zürn also composed nearly 124 playful anagram poems (1953-1964), and later wrote her second “mad love” autobiographical novel, Dark Spring, 1969, which predicted in detail her death, and from which the current show draws its title.  It was Henri Michaux who supplied Zürn, ensconced in a sanitarium near the end of her life, with notebooks and ink, and he is the one who rescued the art that resulted by retrieving most of them during subsequent visits. It was also rumored that a love affair with Michaux, and becoming involved in his mescaline experiments as part of his research into human consciousness, helped trigger her bouts with depression—along with the bouts of creation so amply evident here.


Phantasmagorical creatures hover at the center of Zürn’s sketchbook pages, as if without gravity, bearing multiple sets of eyes, breasts, limbs, and orifices, but in a somewhat zoological order: birds up high, cat in the middle, snakes and fish below, all dated and signed. Some photos of the artist reveal an attractive, intelligent, unsmiling face, even in her role as lover, muse, and sadomasochistic collaborator with Bellmer (the inventor of sexually mutant dolls). She posed for his disturbing black-and-white photographs, bound tight by ropes digging deeply into her flesh, turning her body into a grotesquely coiled sack of bulbous flesh. 


Sad and haunting, with a delicate feminine touch, these magical drawings reveal one of the most febrile imaginations among surrealists. Intense and otherworldly, her work offers a perspective into a private subconscious domain that contemporary artists, particularly those interested in psychedelic art, will find richly rewarding.

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Sergey Bratkov is a photographer who was active in the Fast Reaction Group, an urban interventionist collective prominent in Ukraine during the mid-1990s (together with Boris Mikhailov, Sergey Solonsky, and Victoria Mikhailova). 

Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt

Sergey Bratkov is a photographer who was active in the Fast Reaction Group, an urban interventionist collective prominent in Ukraine during the mid-1990s (together with Boris Mikhailov, Sergey Solonsky, and Victoria Mikhailova). His work arrives out of a consciousness of his own time gauged against the political, social, and economic contingencies of the “just past.” Bratkov seeks out young subjects who find themselves listless within a liminal space inscribed by the temporal gap between Ukraine’s Soviet period and its subsequent reincarnation as an evolving market economy and political anomaly. In Koldo Mitxelena, the artist remixes images that approach the child as a subject beyond common juvenile clichés. Bratkov’s children come from a generation “in between” that still hold a residual infantile consciousness of the immediately prior while prematurely entering an adolescence located in an antithetical elsewhere. These kids, forever parentless and invulnerable, are consumed by an alienating experience of youth that is still often reduced to exchange value by the increasing international demand for adoption and abundant sex trafficking.

“In the winter of 1996, my financial situation was so disastrous that I had to rent out my two-room flat, and stayed in the studios of various friends. I had no idea that my flat was not far from an orphanage hidden in the private housing sector across the street. My first tenants were Americans who came to Kharkiv to find children to adopt into their families. The adoption procedure took two weeks. The future parents and children were expected to become acquainted at the orphanage. So the foreigners stuffed their bags with food and clothes they had bought beforehand in the U.S. for the children, and went to the orphanage every morning. When they returned at the end of the day, they promptly locked the iron-rimmed door of my flat, and did not go out until the next morning. Two weeks later, the temperature dropped below -15ºC. I needed to go back to my apartment for my fur cap. I called my flat. At that time, my tenant Clare had already chosen a child for herself, a fair-haired boy with traces of Mongolian heritage apparent in his face. Clare was worried: did the boy resemble her husband? I offered to take a photo of the boy and send it back home to enable John to prepare himself morally for the encounter with his new family. Clare was overjoyed and agreed that I should photograph the boy. The following day, I went to take the photographs. Electricity was switched off in our town for reasons of economy that winter. Everything sank into darkness. In the moonlight, the house of the orphanage looked like grim barracks. It was dark inside the house, too. A few candles were burning on windowsills along the corridor. Two women were washing children in the bathroom. Candles in empty cans were tied to water taps with bandage gauze. The child I was looking for was in the second-floor dormitory. I stepped into the room with a candle in my hand. I could make out the outlines of about two dozen beds in the moonlight pouring through the windows. Suddenly hundreds of ghosts attacked me. They were children with bed sheets over their heads, and all of them were shouting, ‘DADDY!!!’ These were my first children, and the beginning of my long journey of children photography.”

—Sergey Bratkov, May 2004

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Éva Pelczer

Rarely does a photojournalistic exhibit go so far beyond the gallery as Jonathan Torgovnik has taken his series, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. In raising awareness of the survivors of the brutal genocide of 1994, his diligent documentation of these women’s stories led to the establishment of a non-profit organization, Foundation Rwanda, dedicated to providing them and their children financial, educational, and health services. The exhibit itself has been shown internationally, and the women’s testimonies read aloud at awareness rallies and at commemoration ceremonies honoring the 15-year anniversary of the genocide, most notably at the UN in New York City on April 8.

It is impossible to remain unmoved by the collection of photographs and personal stories comprising the show. This is not an art exhibit; instead it is a candid, disturbing, and illuminating series of portraits and testimonies whose unabashed mission is to channel horror and empathy into a tangible reservoir of aid to the subjects in question (the images themselves have been used in other promotional material for Foundation Rwanda). In addition to this main monetary purpose, the show also promotes simple awareness of a genocide that is no longer an active concern for the rest of the world. Awareness is part of the burden these women carry, and perhaps the world’s shouldering more of it is better currency than aid money itself.

Torgovnik’s photographs are filled with saturated colors that brighten the room. They line the four walls of the large gallery, each with an accompanying text. In large font, the passages spell out excerpts from the women’s stories. The language is straightforward, and its simplicity, reflected in the portraits themselves, is jarring in contrast to the brutality the women describe. There are nearly 35 women around the room but it is difficult to make it through even half the texts—rape after rape, one more horrific than the next. The women talk about their resulting children; some say they hate them, others speak about the children’s innocence in contrast to their rapists’ crimes, and nearly all say they haven’t told the young teenagers, some of whom ask for their fathers, the circumstances of their birth. A prevailing concern—at least in these edited narratives—is the education of the children, and their uncertain future. Some women have given up; some have tried to commit suicide, and some are living only for their children. One woman feels lucky to have been raped by “only one” man. “Survivors” seems like an inadequate term for them.

Instead of dramatizing the subject, Torgovnik lets the photographs speak for themselves. A video at the center of the exhibition is one exception; one can watch translated footage of interviews with a number of the women, set to a soundtrack and edited in a style meant to wring every bit of heartache from their stories. It seems unnecessary; the stories of the genocide are disturbing enough without outside help. The interview with Torgovnik himself is similarly slick (both videos shown at the exhibit are available online), and raises the question of why the artist would need to verbalize the difficulty of an experience that is already so obvious in the work itself and his photographic hand.

Commendably, Torgovnik isn’t interested in presenting a stereotype of strong, selfless mothers in the face of oppression. The women’s strength is undeniable, but so is their humanity—Torgovnik doesn’t shy away from their depression, hopelessness, and hatred, most apparent in the unedited transcriptions of their narratives presented in the exhibit’s accompanying book.

Donating to Foundation Rwanda serves to sop up the feeling of helplessness instilled by the exhibit, but the situation in Africa is complicated—both in the consequences of sending aid and its potential ineffectiveness in the long run. Contributing money on a small scale is a measurable act of aid, but will not change the deep-seeded root of the problem, which is now the rejection of these women by their existing communities for the stigma associated with rape and having had a “child of the Hutus.” The reality is that these women, despite making up 70 percent of Rwanda’s surviving population, remain unsupported by their own people. As one woman, “Brigette” says, “I’m paying a price for the sins that I never committed.” But in such numbers, it is up to them to take control of the country—a point made by several prominent feminists, including Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and genocide survivor activist.

Awareness is meant, in the words of Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, founder of SURF (a survivor’s fund for victims of the genocide) to “remind us of the suffering that must never again be permitted to happen to anyone.” (Although as Torgovnik has mentioned, the same kind of violence is now being perpetrated against women of Congo and Darfur despite an arguably extensive awareness of the situation by the rest of the world.) Foundation Rwanda strives to provide the women with basic help not provided by Rwanda itself, and to ensure education for their young teenagers, who will soon represent, in age, nearly half the population.

However, the country’s fragmentation needs a resolution that is self-sustaining. As Dambisa Moyo, economist and author of Dead Aid, has pointed out, the education of a child needs a purpose beyond Western satisfaction—the possibility of a job, and an economy in which it can be applied. There is little to criticize in Torgovnik’s photographs and subsequent activism, but what it takes on is enormous: a genocide of which the effects will reverberate through many more generations of Rwandans. The most effective thing the show offers toward long-term solution is not Foundation Rwanda’s donations, but its power to reach others through the experience of the women’s pictures and testimonies—as it already has, and will continue to do all over the America, from college campuses to the UN.

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David Laity

I select all my works via instinct and intuition rather than any intellectual reasoning. At times it almost seems as though the images select me. I paint what I love and I love the luscious curves and exaggerated hips of the female form. My works are a celebration of love and intimacy, and I endeavor to show sexuality in this light. I feel part of the historic tradition of erotica. I very much admire the work of Modigliani, Balthus, and Egon Schiele, as well as the Japanese Shunga artists of the late Edo period. In the contemporary context I feel a connection with the photographers Trevor Watson, Ellen von Unwerth, Eric Kroll, and Natacha Merritt, who work in the realm of the erotic.

I have reached a point in my painting where I am much more free with the paint on the canvas. It’s both a confidence and an intuitive thing. As a result my paintings seem more responsive and fluid, and this freedom translates to the canvas as lightness and sensuality. It’s an unconscious thing. I think this lightness is something that people react to when they see my painting. People tend to react to my work on an instinctive level, which is great because that’s how they are created. In my mind there is nothing more alluring than a woman who is both confident and comfortable with her body and sensuality. 
 

Impasto has added a whole new dimension to my work, it’s brought it alive. When I do really fast impasto and let it dry there’s certain energy with it that you just can’t get with flat paint. The texture is frozen on the canvas capturing that energy forever. There’s a depth to my painting and a different energy to my work. Impasto gives people something to look at besides the image. Viewers want to reach out, touch, and explore my paintings. I love seeing this reaction to my work.


I don’t try to be politically correct and I don’t mind if people find my work too confronting. What is important to me is that my work provokes a reaction from the viewer (hopefully positive), because if the work fails to do this, then it’s just a picture…easily forgotten. To some degree I feel there has been a lightening up of society’s view of sexuality. For example you can go into almost any general bookshop and see sexually explicit material, something that wasn’t the case even ten years ago. There’s been a shift in the material available too, how it’s produced: less underground, more positive.

Naughty is fun. To paint the images I do I have to enjoy them. I love their sexiness and approach painting them in a fun and positive way. Much of the eroticism seen in my art comes from what is not there—from what is not explained and from the story that gets told in the mind of the viewer. I also like seeing how far I can push things—the layers of paint, the images I choose—and I like watching people’s reactions to new work.

Other people’s moralities are their responsibility, not mine.

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Bill Durgin

My photographs reflect a fascination with the body as form. The complex figurations and undulating arrangements of flesh—as the body seems to collapse into itself—create the image of an almost abstracted figure lacking appendages and hair. The physical structure becomes more than just a shell, evolving into a moving sculpture of skin, muscle, fat, and bone.

The gesture within each photograph is created through an exploration of my own physical limitations and a collaborative improvisation with dancers and performers. Often I come up with a pose, demonstrate it and then ask the model to repeat or respond to it. Each pose transmogrifies the figure toward abstraction, exaggerating or diminishing the skeletal structure until it approaches an amorphous form. I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but to also be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous.

Composed through a 4-by-5-view camera, I place the figure within the location and select an angle to shoot from. I then remove any furnishings to create a perspective that highlights the architecture, the light, and the figure itself. Each space is empty, but not anonymous. It is a setting not a set, within which the figure is grounded in a particular environment revealed by the traces of the doorway, ceiling, or floor. Suspended along the edges of the space, along the edges of figuration, these photographs also move along the edges of narrative, portrait, and environmental photography.

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Fernando Vicente

When I paint I like to do so on printed materials; it is a way to unite my passion for topics such as anatomy and mechanics, and my hobby for collecting posters, maps, atlases, and geography with my work. To find this material I’ve been to the flea market of Madrid (called “Rastro”), and in shops and antique fairs. Even my first exhibition was a series of paintings on advertisements (like the ones on bus shelters) and posters that advertise concerts. Many of these posters are torn off the wall of the street; they spend some time in the study before I even think about using them as support for a painting. Once I bought a collection of posters from a mechanic and they accompanied me a few years before becoming tables in my Anatomies series. I try to use the posters to find the shape of the human figure, creating kinds of robotic cyborgs or forms. I am always interested in cyberpunk culture and the human body.

The Vanitas series comprises my latest exhibition, and is material that I’m still working on: the human body without subterfuge, outside and inside, its fragility. It is the mirror to look in to realize how fragile we are, what we think, and that we all have the same viscera, arteries, and muscles.

Inside the human body is a tremendous beauty. I am captured by it; it took years and a selection of medical books and anatomical atlases. This series attempts to reflect its beauty. For a long time the inside of the human body has been reserved for the exclusive use of medicine and science; it is time now to claim it for our contemplation. The Vanitas is a recurring theme in the history of painting (vanitas vanitatis, omnia vanitas: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity”), intended to convey the futility of worldly pleasures compared to the certainty of death, usually represented by a skull surrounded by wealth. It reminds us that the skeleton of our time here is finite and therefore it is useless to accumulate wealth.

Vanitas: I try to represent this new vanity of fashion and glamour—so many main characters of the paintings are like mock covers of fashion magazines like Vanity Fair—“omnia vanitas.”

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