ARTIST'S ROOM
1999-2001
ARTIST'S ROOM
The place that I chose was a common insignificant white room, extraordinarily small in dimension. In spite of all of this, in that moment I believed it was the most important thing that I had. There was no object or person that could have given me a more sincere sensation of a claustrophobic existence, which I was feeling in my everyday life. The only thing that I remember with certainty is that when I began these drawings I was feeling a terrible sensation of not belonging to the world and this feeling was accentuated with each new event that I encountered in my life. Only today, a few months later, do I realize that the space, which I painted with such insistence, never actually existed. Instead, it was only one of the many expressions of my paranoid imagination! I was sick and I was feeling a great need to find a way out. But from what? At the time, I didn't trust anybody and I was so proud of this fact that I was writing barely legible statements about mistrust, in red pen, on each piece of paper that passed before my hands. Since I was alone and a guest in a country that wasn't mine, I arrived to the conclusion that the only way to escape this unpleasant situation was to search inside myself to find the answers that continually escaped me in my everyday life. And where should I have begun this debilitating interrogation if not in my tiny studio in Brooklyn? I was taken by the rush to finally have in my hands the truth, which was continuously obscured by the perverse games of the man and the media, I began to search and comb through every single angle of every wall of the room, sparing nothing, not even a square centimeter. I would have succeeded in scratching the walls with my fingers if it was necessary. Just the idea to undertake this manic search made me feel much better. In those days, I only wished to be a prisoner within my own imaginary walls. It is useless to say that this painful fog continues to envelop my life today and that the answers for which I was searching have never arrived. It is more or less like this - I have begun this debilitating travel in my psyche through the illusion of the room.
Artist's Room is a series of 25 drawings on paper in A4 format, executed in mixed technique (pastel, charcoal, and glue) during the years 1999 - 2001.