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The Dream of the Toroid

Acrylic on Canvas.
180 x 195 cm (70¨ x 76¨)

2023

This artwork began with a dream I had, where there was a minotaur that a woman and two men were trying to hold and lock up, tying him up and directing him with several ropes. I understood that the bull was a symbol of my masculinity, which felt directed and confined by Western society. Months later I traveled to southern Italy, I went to visit the Archaeological Museum of Naples. There, near the end of my visit, I came across an immense sculpture carved on marble known as “Toro Farnese” that took my breath away. It was similar than my dream.

An allegory of the attributes of the masculine, bringing together a compendium of reflections on its place in today's society and in my personal life.

This painting, inspired by that sculpture and that dream, is an allegory of the attributes of the masculine, bringing together a compendium of reflections, both on his place in today's society and on a personal level. I think by painting, and that is why I need to put my reflections on canvas. By capturing the images in my head on canvas, I create connections between them, creating new codes of language and meaning, and this helps me to understand things. But there is not a closed discourse, nor a conclusion, they are only reflections about what can be healthy masculinity in our days.

The bull tries to break free from his oppressors, and finally, in my dream, he succeeds. They want to dominate and control masculinity, to domesticate and define what it is, to limit its forms of expression and development. This is how I have always felt, I have never fit into the conventional patterns of Patriarchal Masculinity, and so I have sought and continue to seek other ways of being and relating to Masculine energy, my own and that of the society in which I live, trying to identify the positive attributes of this. It is about separating the masculine from the gender and being able to identify its essence, detached from the cultural.

The half-human half-bull hybrid character, apparently, of the Selknam ritual, (an unfortunately extinct tribe from Tierra del Fuego, south of Patagonia), reminds us that we can learn from the animal, as a totem, as a symbol, incarnating it. In the Selknam ritual it is called Kótaix and is a spirit that defends men from an evil female spirit. But he is not only good, he can also be dangerous.
See: History of the Selk'nam religion of Tierra del Fuego. Boris Briones Soto. Editorial Círculo Rojo.

The image of the solitary wolf at night captured by a photo trapping camera somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula (inspired by a photo found on the Internet), takes us to the wild, to the depth of the forest, where there is no longer civilization, or seen in another way to the depth of our being, where we are pure, where our primary instincts are, detached from all civilizing artifice, equating it to the search for the essence of the Masculine. In Parallel, that return to the wild, connects with the vertebral theme of all my work, the reconnection with Nature, with that understanding that we are one with her. I understand that it is a vital need in our society to empathize with that side, to break the barrier that separates the “civilized” from the “wild” to return and recover our lost self.

On the right side we see a geometric structure, it is a synthesis of the family tree. It makes me reflect on the lineage of masculine energy in my family and which have been the models or anti- models that I have had.

Above the Bull there is a small triangle with the vertex upwards, a kind of arrow pointing towards the sky. It is a symbol of the masculine. If we draw an equilateral triangle taking as a base the base of the painted sculpture... the vertical vertex fits exactly at this point, thus generating another masculine triangle, invisible but which gives structure to the whole work. At the top left we find some lines and dots, which represent the constellation of Taurus, the Bull.

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