STORYBOARD

“A set of sketches, arranged in a sequence of panels, outlining the scenes that will make up something to be filmed”…

Having reached what I though was the end of a road,- drawing and painting allegorical characters that only existed in my mind-, I turned two years ago towards reality in a quest for a deeper and more complex rendering of my ideas. I invited people I knew, whose stories were interesting to me, to pose for my paintings. I introduced likeness and individuality where before there was fantasy and archetypes.

The recent loss of my father in 2007 may have had something to do with this need for detail, explicitness and painting technique that seemed at odds with some of my usual trademarks. The left hand drawings, bright colours and a special sense of humor, got replaced by something darker and sharper, by people that came from real life and not from an imaginary world.

I have been looking for people and asking them to pose for me. I ask them to choose one painting -from a History of Art book- and one character within that artwork, and then dress up and “perform” like the one they have chosen.

This small “performances” allow those characters to enter an imaginary world. They are real and yet they are also half fictitious. In that way they become part of this very, very long “storyboard”, in which the panels and the sketches outline a narrative yet to be established. A story that bridges past, present and future, bringing together reality and meta-reality in glimpses of the individual subconscious, in borrowed gazes of people imagining what they could be. This paintings are about a story yet to be painted, or already painted but yet to be lived. They act as a secret code for those who are to perform in a ghost film: An odd carnival lit with the colours of contradiction and misrepresentation.