Building the Endearment is a hybrid between the photographic and the illustrated, is a conceptual means of expressing the artist’s personal conquest of individual freedom. It demonstrates the emotional effort, necessary for adaptation to one’s surroundings, assembling permanent strings of affection which themselves are in constant flux throughout a person’s lifetime. To do this, I use discursive elements such as the memory and the fondness, through the metaphor.

It is a work of an autobiographical nature, in which I try to express how I build emotions through memories, memory of the everyday, genetic memory (legacies and influences), mental imprints of experiences, i.e. of the existence in itself of that world of feelings that is created over time. Through my work, I become aware of myself and of my past and present environment. Think of who I am and how I got here, realize all that has concerned me, feel and recognize that other individuals, the society, time, space, my history and that of my people, have affected to me. Pure consciousness!

Within this project one encounters people, moments, objects and genetic memory, experiences, and remembrances of parents and grandparents, which form my emotional biography. In this creation, the past and future transmission of memory play an innate and primal role. It’s my purpose to express and evaluate the whirlpool of ideas that gather around my origin story as well as my own personal memories. It’s these constant references to the past that enable the construction of the future.

I rescue the materials used in the project from my childhood memories, the strings, the paper and the sheet fabric are linked to my deepest past intimacy. The acetates represent certain memories that appear blurred in my memory and that I cannot manage to decipher. In my childhood I travelled through fantastic worlds, observing the photos and ancient frames that I recover in this work, moments in which I created my own stories, my own memories, about those unknown yet familiar characters. Stories that they are recorded in my mind as if they were real, and that I have tried to narrate through the threads that sew the boxes of the Genetic Memory.

Finally, I choose cyanotype for the implications and possibilities it offers. Blue, leads me to an imaginary and oneiric inner world in which the pictorial touch of random and expressive brushstrokes allowed a revealing of non-uniform images.

Four manifestations that bring about the discussion:

- Traces of Memory: 6 pieces in paper mounted on DM lacquered in white in methacrylate box. In, pieces of paper make small abstractions in triptychs and diptychs in which silhouettes and object transfers, as well as traces of pencil markings, are seen as if part of an archaeological site, collectively describing scenes of a lived life. They are subsequently intervened with bleach, paint and sewn.

- Erased Conversations: 7 pieces made in cotton fabric from old sheets and mounted on wooden racks on DM lacquered in white and methacrylate box. Picks up on the moments of solitude from a lonely childhood as an only child. The viewer sees the artist’s own impact on his family, his individual growth, and the effects of degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s Disease; an illness which expedites the disappearance of the very memories I intend to reproduce.

- Inherited Memory: 11 small sculptures made of paper, string, and methacrylate and recycled wooden frame. Inherited Memory is created from the assemblage of scenes from the lives of the artist’s ancestors. These are placed in small vintage frames and plastic cubes which appear to be stitched and veiled. The artist assembles all these memories, which come from other people, and uses them in his own origin story along with the exploration of his first social stirrings.

- Presences & Absences: polyptychs mounted following the same process that in the previous cases, evoking a childhood puzzles game. Two large pieces are made entirely of tiny portraits, some of which are empty and represent the absences and vacuums in memory. New figures and characters can occupy these same voids. The portraits and empty spaces appear as groupings of cyanotypes along with charcoal, lye and oil paint.

The end result is an autobiography containing the dedication, sacrifices, love and affection that inhabit memories, and which lead to the foundation of the essential construction behind every individual.