* holy beauty :: belleza sagrada :: la beauté sacrée

I’ll be exhibiting in Rennes, starting the 1st October, in the former location of a Polish restaurant, Niebieski Kon (The blue horse). During the entire month, I’ll be showing a series of unedited drawings and paintings (I’ll post a small preview on the blog soon). The owner and chef of the restaurant -who moved to a bigger place just across the street- will delight us with some typical Polish treats on the day of the launching. The title -in Polish- means “Holy Beauty”.

More good news: an article about me has been published in the first issue of international magazine Arte Libertino, which focuses on Latin American arts and culture. I have been invited to participate with my work on the occasion of the magazine’s launching. To read the article (in Spanish) follow this link : Los oscuros ríos del corazón by Felipe Clavijo.

On another note, I’d like to take the opportunity and make public that, after a year and a half of endless postponements and vague answers, I have decided to call off the exhibition in Paris that was due for November 2009 at Door Studios. The lack of seriousness and reliability from the gallery’s team forced me to cancel the -yet hypothetical- event, that was being planned since April 2008. Regretfully, I had accumulated and reserved a considerable amount of work, which led me to turn down some very good exhibition and sales opportunities. I want to make clear that I was always honest and prompt towards the people at Door Studios, and in response I got complete negligence and incapability to deliver on previous agreements, along with several ignored phone calls and messages. In other words, a total lack of professionalism.

Thank you to those in Paris who’ve shown interest in viewing my work live. Although I’m sorry that this time it won’t happen, I’m certain that it will in the near future. I’m eager to show all my new work and willing to seize new opportunities. I’ll continue my research. In the meantime, see you in Rennes!

Last week I had a photo session with a beautiful girl from Rennes, Chloé Collewet. She’s a former drawing student of mine, and she turned out being a wonderful model! The idea was to get more material for the “special portfolio” I’d mentioned, which consists basically of a group of ‘edgy and fashionable’ photos I’m gathering for my agent. -For those who don’t know, fashion is one of my big passions!-. Chloé kindly agreed to pose for me, as well as bring garments of her own, previously chosen by me, to create different ‘looks’. All pictures where taken in my neighborhood; I had a lot of fun doing styling, makeup, etc, for each one of the shoots.

I actually wasn’t planning to show all these images here, but I really like them! Here go some outtakes too:

On another note, I will be exhibiting for the second time in France in the following months. More about this soon!

There’s a sense of absurdity that fills everything in my life at the moment, weakening all statement, ideal, hope or belief. Since I don’t have much to say lately, instead of waiting to be struck by an idea, I find myself thinking of interesting angles from which to capture places I pass by and people I encounter.

I’m also finding more and more difficult to play with images in Photoshop; I’m only tweaking contrast and saturation, and that’s about it. The type of photographs I usually enjoy has changed too. These days I like simpler images without much trickery involved, good compositions and color combinations, nothing pretentious or overnice. Even better if it’s something disturbing and appealing. I run upon this kind of images more often in fashion magazines/ web-zines than in ‘art’ circles…some examples: Lina Scheynius, Janieta Eyre and Terry Richardson.

During my holiday in Sweden I took several touristy snap shots. Nevertheless, I managed to capture some images I consider good enough to upload here. They are a fair example of what I said above. *Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.

Models: Tove Florén, whom you may recognize from previous photos, and me.