Pieles, 2016
Mixed media.




These masks can be related to Carnival festivities or to artistic expressions of some African cultures. The identification of a group of individuals with a kind of beliefs or social rituals. Pieles tries a new approach to these traditional values within a framework and under the inquisitive perspective of an experimental "psychoanalyst".

The work focuses on the process of creation and construction of identity. In the development and elaboration of other possibilities or virtual alternatives to my own self. As a facial reconstruction in a futuristic plastic surgery, as a circumstantial prosthesis or as a second skin. An abstract entity which continues its own vital impulse, attending to their own transformation or metamorphosis.

Transferring the soul to the object (mask) through a transfusion of values and movement. To revive or encourage the inert object created in the inner likeness, copying psychological states of the subject. Its representation, filled with intentions and symbolism, converted into archetypes, part of the collective and individual unconscious, representing the fears and aspirations of several generations. Establishing communication with the beyond. Picking up the conflict of the man with the death. Inspecting archaic artistic expressions such as mummification and burial masks.

These masks could happen as an invocation to the forces of the war. Against some kind of existential reductionism that prevails in society. Against standardization, typecasting, isolation and discrimination of the multifaceted self. Against the uniqueness and the alienation of the soul. To delegitimize the severe overview in the contemporary world about the natural capabilities of human beings to transgress or distort the reality of their immediate environment.

For the right to not be seen or no visibility. To anonymity. To privacy. The information provided by the human face, its codification, interpretation, deconstruction or alteration. Dealing with the fear of the unknown, to the unseen, to the outside, forbidden.