In my work, I deal with a concept that flourished in literature at the end of XVIIIth century: the other. Also know in German literature as the doppelgänger, this idea involves a duality of the self which is either duplicated in the figure of an identical second self or divided into polar opposite selves. We all have a doppelgänger that competes with the self we are aware of and overlaps with it, turning us into strangers to ourselves. Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fiódor Dostoyevski and Guy de Maupassant, among others, have exposed that myth in literature. But it has also been investigated in science and psychology since Freud began to identify the self and its double with the conscious and the subconscious. Recently, French physicist Jean-Pierre Garnier Malet has developed the Doubling Theory. According to it, each body has a double with which it is possible to communicate through imperceptible holes in time. He believes that each body lives in two times at the same time.
The uncanny double lies beneath everything that we understand as safe and comforting. I started working with film stills because I wanted to take as models iconic images that I had to appropriate from others. Thus, I wanted to emotionally separate myself from the subject and use images from the big screen and show world, sometimes seen as archetypes, characters that the viewer could easily identify by their features in the same way that we can recognize a saint by their iconography.
Their faces are decontextualized and set on an empty background, beside their doppelgänger, which is disfigured and distorted in several ways. Sometimes, only symmetry suggests the idea of the double and creates a specular image.
I use anamorphosis to introduce the third dimension in the painting, not by regarding it as a window to look through, but as an object that, like a sculpture, must be viewed from several points of view. When you look at my paintings from the edge, the doppelgänger is not seen to be distorted anymore and becomes understandable. In doing so, I am including the space around the painting, the space where the viewer stands and wanders to explore the work. A painting is not a two-dimensional surface anymore, as I have included an area outside of it that involves the third dimension.
In my latest series, Doppelgänger, I portray the above mentioned writers and philosophers, that wrote about this subject and created a collective imagination that still comes to us, renewed and revisited. Here, I have almost suppresed everything that is recognizable and instead I show only an anamorphosis, hiding and unveiling, as if playing hide and seek. The painting becomes an abstraction with an unsettling element, which we cannot clearly distinguish, indicating to us there is something fishy going on there. The result is a disfigured image, a distorted portrait that acquires autonomy as a new being, a superego of the self and the doppelgänger.
The oval frame recalls past ages, but the bright colours I use are still shocking and bring the image to a contemporary context. The background inside the oval is covered in a reflective pigment that mimics a mirror and implies the idea of giving their reflection back to the viewers, and including them into the painting. Whenever art mirrors nature it is in order for the artworks to be mirrors for the viewer.
