VIEWING ROOM "NOBODY"

"Nobody"

The events that concern me as a creator directly influence my vision and the motifs I wish to depict.

This painting was created between the winter of 2020 and the spring of 2021, in the midst of the process of ending the lockdown forced upon us by the terrible COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout these months, my priority has focused on a profound reflection on the susceptibility of the human species and the race to become aware as a society of preparing for future major shocks, which we are certain will come.

Certainty, uncertainty, and essence. The clearer we are about our essence, the greater the balance between our identity and who we want to be. Move by who you truly are and not by what you should be.

Being at peace with who you are, so as not to fear uncertainty, and deciding to survive without reproach for as long as it takes, is not resignation, but another version of happiness.

Nobody was conceived after a personal process that has transcended a substantial change in my life and that marked a before and after in my essence that I continue to seek day by day: just for today. For every great change, a transformation is required that exposes us to the point of extinction.

Hitting rock bottom to be aware, and if we manage to survive, to be able to start the path to transcend.

So far, Nobody is the painting that reflects my greatest technical advances in tune with a clear and honest personal conceptual vision that I want to convey.

Its message essentially speaks of my personal circumstances translated through a metaphorical scene of this half-naked woman whose serenity wants to convey to us the process she has lived to achieve the self-confidence that allows her to face what could be to come.

The metaphor includes a series of symbols: The origins of Nobody go back to four previous paintings linked together whose kinship shows ideas expressed by women wrapped in bubble wrap. Ice and other materials are included as similar substitutes for female models. The creation of these alternatives also served to convey the necessary transparencies that induce the viewer to look inward.

This series sought to create an entire universe in which human figures and objects coexist, creating a new vision that included, for example, the genre of still lifes, but also intended to show landscapes and narratives that are yet to be developed.

Eleven years of maturation passed between my work Alternating Current, Ice, and the two still life examples, which showed screws, washers, and wires encapsulated in ice.

The result was this new painting titled Nobody, in which I once again pay tribute for the third time to another saga that since I was a teenager marked my creativity through hundreds of drawings that I made, as well as cardboard models, which finally ended up in the trash can back in the 80s: Blade Runner by Ridley Scott in 1982, and Blade Runner 2049 by Denis Villeneuve in 2017. Cult films that I have found in their content perfect suggestions towards my own personal universe concerns.

Part of my process of maturation and honesty over these years has consisted of losing my fear of taking on other people's ideas without complexes or prejudices, processing them in an attempt to create independent images, always with deep respect and the appropriate declaration of the corresponding copyright.

The element itself that I respectfully borrow and incorporate into my painting as is, is the Baseline Test, derived from Voight Kampff's machine, from the science fiction novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick from 1968.

In my painting the machine has examined the woman and is also examining the viewer, there are textures and translucent elements that accompany the internal silence of the character and those ice structures that synthesize all the essence of the diversity of lives that we could find in the most unusual structures.

I try to generate a series of reflections on our identity and on how external controls and examinations influence us. A reflection on how this analysis affects us and how it makes us who we are.

Nobody belongs to a series whose project called Transparencies aims to develop an ecosystem of paintings on essence, identity, and on the new concepts that can be reborn from this research.

–Edgar Mendoza