HUMANS
PAINTING
DRAWING
There is a certain continuity between the refashioning of the painting Tres de Mayo by Goya (CLASSICO N°1), and the picture of the loyalist soldier hit by gunfire (COMBATTANTS N°10), immortalized by Robert Capa in 1936: in a way the two series are twins, despite the fact that the HUMANS serie is inspired by photos. Initially, the painter worked with famous pictures, like that of Capa or the photo of the child in the Warsaw ghetto (COMBATTANTS N°11), but then he decided to focus on one historic event - the Spanish Civil War - and limit himself to amateur photographs, found online. What the process loses in the strength of its citational approach, abandoning universal iconic references, it undoubtedly gains in emotion. Magnifying these small photographic prints to life-size seems to resurrect the ghosts buried by history. Instead of playing on the typical pathos associated with images of war, the painter focuses on portraits of people who are armed, but smiling at the camera, both soldiers and civilians, in a troubling tension between violence and happiness. The gesture of brushing the canvas, iconoclastic in the CLASSICO serie, is enhanced by new symbolic connotations. It increases the fragility of the photographic medium, itself a metaphor of passing time, and of a fading memory, whether individual or collective. Blurring the image also evokes a lack of focus, the melancholy reverie of the viewer, their eyes wet with tears. Erasing facial features, more marked than in the CLASSICO serie, also seems to say: regardless of identity, all that remains are the gestures, the gun on the shoulder, and the valiant smile. Is there something to be digested here too, in terms of the painter's family history, closely intertwined as it was with the Spanish Civil War? The emotion is ambiguous, the purpose is neither autobiographical nor directly political. It is inextricably pictorial and humanist, offering the canvas as a special meeting place between two worlds and two faces, that of the viewer and that of the anonymous person in history.