Conexión

Assembly of Self

Oil on canvas · 81 x 60.5 cm · 2024

Exhibited at the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern, Barcelona, Spain (2025)

At first glance, this painting seems to speak of mechanics… a woman absorbed in a manual on how to build a Porsche Turbo Engine. But for me, it became something far more intimate: a return to the core of why I paint. The canvas once belonged to my father. He never got to use it. So even unwrapping it carried meaning. Its black surface forced me to work in reverse… almost like painting with light instead of shadow. It brought me back to my earliest experiments with watercolor, where forms emerge gradually, delicately, with intention. That inversion of process mirrored what the painting became: an inward journey, built piece by piece from curiosity, memory, and motion. I've always loved cars… their beauty, their precision, the music of their engines, their latent energy. This scene captures a moment of deep focus: a connection not just with the machine, but with the joy of doing something for no other reason than love. Each hand, each fold, each technical detail asked for presence and patience.It's about that rare, sacred moment when the world grows quiet, inside and out, and we fully connect. When everything aligns: heart, mind, and motion. It's about that rare, sacred moment when the noise of the world, both inside and out, fades away. When we feel deeply aligned and connect to a part of ourselves that feels… eternal. This piece isn't just about a machine. It's about the silent, deliberate work of shaping the Self¹ hand in hand with presence, ego, essence, and unity with the whole. Where the external becomes a mirror of the internal.¹ In the spirit of Spinoza's philosophy, the “Self” here refers not merely to ego or identity, but to the deeper essence of being—an individual expression of the whole, shaped through presence, reason, and inner alignment.