VIEWING ROOM "ADAM AND EVE"

Adam and Eve

I started this painting in 2018 and completed it three years later in 2021.

An unfinished project whose characteristics and symbolism were largely suggested by the collector.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the work was the lesson left by its exhaustive realization, to which I dedicated all my resources and pictorial tools up to that moment.

This work has been a lesson about the general values that help an artist stay on their feet in the face of adversity.

The challenge was to satisfy the collector's full vision, setting aside my own free interpretation, a situation that greatly drained me, questioning my own foundations and making me doubt my own abilities.

A whole battle against the artist's ego and a profound reflection on the limits that should exist between the person commissioning a painting and the painter themself.

Being able to satisfy that need of another, obtaining their full acknowledgment, is one of the best rewards for our work, but a complex individuality of each party often comes into play in this transaction.

The painting underwent countless changes and modifications, which at first I decided to take on as the best of challenges, but after so many corrections, my will began to wane, creating chaos in my own sense of security.

I stopped believing in myself and my ego played a very bad trick on me... As painters, we experience multiple lessons throughout our career that will turn us into the best professional version we aspire to, but in this process, we learn much more from the major blows and obstacles we manage to overcome.

The painting hung in my studio for a prolonged time as if it were a warning, but also in this noble craft, time usually heals mistakes, and one day "Adam and Eve" made peace with my past frustrations...

The values of Adam and the teaching of Eve

It could be said that paintings are like living entities, they are not just objects; a painting accumulates the entire record of diverse circumstances that the author lives while creating it. And even more so when it comes to pictorial realism, due to the long duration and coexistence needed for its execution.

How could AI replace that human record called painting?... We won't know until it happens, but in the meantime, it will find it very difficult to first experience its own existential consciousness in order to pretend to equal it.

Within all the technical processes developed in my paintings, I value the compositional structure of this work, as well as every modification that was corrected as progress was made. Behind that rigid aspect transmitted by each of the elements that make up this design, there are technical approaches that struggled to give the final result the best aesthetic harmony. The presence of so many elements competing for their place in the visual arrangement was resolved through a harmony of shapes, colors, and spaces that allowed the viewer a sensation that everything is neatly in its place. However, the whole might have worked better had it not been for that finish and pictorial effect—not so realistic—which, in my opinion, turns this painting artificial and illustrative.

All the calculations that I set out and reflected upon became part of my own dictionary for the construction of subsequent paintings, and a combination of technique, trial, error, and my emotional and lived circumstances of those years, have resulted in a painting that I am proud to show today. Its meaning is perhaps what I am least interested in explaining, however, each of the elements that compose this story generates a symbol that I will allow myself to revisit in future versions.

The narrative uses the figures of Adam and Eve merely as a reference to discuss a story about the interpersonal relationships of a couple, about their differences, judgments, and roles played.

Among the symbols we find: Doors as a threshold, an open cage as freedom, a throne as dominance, a monkey as a pet, a dog as fidelity, a board with a contract and an hourglass as relentless time, a broken mirror as a vanitas, a bitten apple...

In the painting, there is an absence of emotions, as if it were a store window display…

–Edgar Mendoza