WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
Male Portrait
- Size: 75 x 50 x 3 cm
- Medium: Acrylic on board
- Year: 2018
- Avalable on: SAATCHI GALLERY
- Know more about this series: GROUPIES
Male portrait
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
When I was a teenager, everyone dreamed of being a rock star. For this reason sometimes I played with my friends to take pics of ourselves in public places, wearing weird and flashy clothes. We were the MTV Generation.
One day taking a look at those black and white images, I suddenly realize that they were the covers of the albums that we never made. I liked so much the concept of a past empty glory, that I decided to celebrate it with a painting.
I ask my friend Pablo to pose for me and one afternoon we met up at a subway station in Madrid. He took off his shirt to put on my black furry coat. People were looking at us curiously. That afternoon I took two hundred photographs, and I was having trouble deciding the right one. Pablo, like a real rock star, sent me the one he prefer, cropped and edited as he likes. That image was just beautiful.
‘What have you done?’ is a sigh, a question and a condemnation. The portrait is not the image of a teenager playing, but of a man who has reached -maybe for a moment- a sacred eternity. Some grey brush strokes create an artificial sky. The neon lights melt into a face with an indecipherable expression. Is it a revelation? Perhaps. However, Pablo’s hands are violently cut off. I like to interpret this as a punishment for doing something wrong. No paradise is possible without tasting the forbidden.
Elia Tomás.
