Siete veces yo
[Seven Times Me]

I began making these notes years ago, at first just as a mnemonic game in which I memorized colour combinations that caught my eye and later materialized them in the studio with small scraps of paper. I noticed supermarket products, advertisements, books, sports shoes, upholstery on a bus… Really any ordinary thing that grabbed my attention, with the aim of diverting that exterior reality to the interior of my studio.

That game later became an exercise, and eventually a daily habit, almost an obsession. During the lockdown period in 2020, my focus shifted from objects to people. When we were able to go outside again, I began to create these colour schemes based on the colours of the clothing of people I passed while walking or on public transport, or of people whom I met for the first time, jotting down the date and sometimes their name. I also created a series of colour schemes based on myself, almost like self-portraits. The schemes began to fill boxes, like the pages of a diary. After all, colour is one of our many letters of introduction to the world. It defines and personalizes us, just as it defines the era and the society in which we live.

The next step was to materialize and weave narratives with them, formalize those intersections of people by means of colour, “embody” and project them outside the drawers where they’re filed away. One example in the exhibition is the installation Siete veces yo [Seven Times Me], where the point of departure is seven colour schemes based on myself that I created between 5 and 11 July 2021. The installation consists of seven cylindrical forms that are as long as my fully outstretched body (slightly over 2 meters), which in turn are divided into three or four segments, depending on the number of colours in the initial colour scheme.

For each colour in every scheme, I applied between 4 and 6 square meters of acrylic paint on paper. I then broke these paintings down into little pieces, no bigger than my fingertip, and stapled them to the cylindrical structures. Each of the seven cylinders is covered with over 10,000 manually applied staples, creating a highly pictorial surface. The monochrome is broken down and becomes a wrapper. The object-body is camouflaged, covered with bits of something that was once a Painting with a capital P. Body, colour and time are intertwined in a structure that’s minimal on the inside and patently baroque on the surface.

Siete veces yo [Seven Times Me] is a journey from memory to matter. Colour travels during this process: it passes from the fabric a person is wearing to my memory, becomes part of a small pocket-sized sketch on paper, is later enlarged in monochromatic paintings, and is finally torn into tiny pieces and stapled onto a three-dimensional surface.