EXPERIENTIAE VITAE SERIES

DADA, HEDUM, CUTEM

The face is a territory of experience here.

In Dada, Hedum y Cutem, identity does not appear as a fixed image, but as a surface in constant construction. The painting advances in layers: covering, dragging, erasing, and building anew. Some areas gain density while others allow the canvas to breathe. The figure seems to emerge from this process, as if each painterly gesture incorporated an experience and each layer preserved the memory of the one before it.

Pink runs through the works as a deliberately ambiguous presence. It inevitably evokes la vie en rose, an idealized, gentle perception of existence, but here it loses any possibility of innocence. It meets deep blacks, earth tones, transparencies, stains, and painterly matter; it appears across the face, surrounds it, and at times interrupts it. Pink does not beautify reality: it enters into tension with it.

This friction between color and image also shifts our first perception. There is beauty, but no complacency. There is vulnerability without fragility, and a strength that does not need to be represented through a heroic gesture. Above all, it lies in presence.

The gaze holds the composition together. Serene and direct, it possesses a dignity that prevents the figure from becoming an object of observation. It does not ask to be interpreted or call for compassion. It looks while being looked at. And in this exchange, the viewer’s position is no longer entirely secure: they are no longer contemplating an identity from the outside, but find themselves face to face with another presence.

The words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on difference resonate here precisely for this reason: because of the need not to turn our own experience into a universal measure. There is a part of the other that the gaze can never possess, just as no image can fully contain a life.

These works occupy the distance between what we see and what we believe we know about what we see. The face reveals and, at the same time, preserves. Beneath its surface remain layers that do not belong to us: memory, origin, experience, contradiction.

Identity is not revealed all at once. It is built in layers, and no gaze can ever exhaust it.