Some time ago, still in 2019, I made a small watercolor based on the famous image of the man who stands up to tanks in the middle of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China, nicknamed “Tank Man”. At that time, the piece – and the set of works I did in those days – allowed me to realize that I could do and say what I needed in my pieces, and leave behind a self-imposed modesty that served no one.
At the same time, I discovered a way of working that was more immediate and free, which allowed me to generate new images in a quick and small format, which – if they worked – could become larger pieces, in ambition and scale.
An important difference that the larger version of the two “Dignity Square” holds is that when it was almost complete, I decided to dirty the paint, damage it a little, turning it into a kind of inaccurate memory, both diffuse and blurred, perhaps making reference to a moment still in transition, still without an outcome, living in a space between a memory and a dream.
Curiously – and with a deep documentary sense – I decided to save the main moment of the “destruction” of the image as part of a small video I made about my work during quarantine, – making a clear allusion to Gerhard Richter and his way of working with large palettes – where you can see the moment when I throw orange paint over the canvas.
Gallery
