Elia Tomás artistic statement.

Subjects

My vision focuses on the human element and uses portraiture as a medium to develop a narrative of individual. For this reason, most of my work have to do with the concept of self-discover: both in oneself (using mask, makeup and costumes) and others (relationships, separations and memories).

Therefore, my subjects often have something unpolished and teen. They go back looking for parts of themselves that have remained incomplete or they live a moment of loneliness with dramatic intensity. They struggle to be someone and sometimes compare themselves to others. Very often they feel victims of a certain hormonal euphoria and a little disappointment. They are wonderfully unstable people seeking to shape themselves. They become fragments where I explore my contradictions and my concerns.

For a long time, my work has focused on questioning masculinity. And I will continue to do so, because we still live in a society that upholds an obsolete concept of masculinity that is both ridiculous and destructive.

Elia Tomás artistic statement.

Style

More than a naturalistic style, I could define my painting as synthetic. Each canvas is a construction of the image from a carefully decontextualized set of photographic material. Most of this material is self-produced, the rest comes from private collections or historical archives. In each work, I like the challenge of creating a different balance between control and accident: in some paintings I try to make a faithful reproduction while in others I give priority to the movement of the paintbrush, turning faces and bodies into a sum of spots to awaken some emotional attention from the spectator.

Elia Tomás artistic statement.

Color

There is something that fascinates me about photographs from the 80s: those shady areas where colors have gradually given way to blue. Since I started painting I tried to reproduce that effect by exaggerating shadows and edges. Little by little, I have added to the blue a fairly complex range of colors, always having as reference the aesthetics of the 80s. Today I consider color my personal terrain of exploration of the contemporary. Without giving up that blue – almost a generational sign – I am looking for chromatically complex compositions. In my latest works I have devoted much attention to yellow and pink, colors that very often arouse some naivety and decadence.

Elia Tomás artistic statement.