Esmoressências (faded essences)

Some time ago, when reading the essay by the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks for the NY Times, when he himself publicly reported a diagnosis made in 2005 of a liver metastasis that gave him only a few months of life, a point in particular touched me in a languorous way, but with the rare delicacy that we only find in moments of extreme sensitivity: "There is no time for anything other than the essential."

It is not often that I have had to deal with essential questions, especially those that touch and restrain my own will, the less rare times when I was knocked at the door of the sense of urgency in conflict with the sense of resistance.

"Esmoressencias" is based on reviewing these conflicts as an observer of another person's experience. An exercise in detachment between a personal drama and the construction of a visual narrative by the confinement of the essence of a man who gradually fades and his forms merge with the forms of the objects that surround them.

This project is marked by a series of reluctance. First, because of the difficulty in doing so, without invading the privacy already so invaded by someone in frank convalescence, especially when that someone is my father. Other points related to my father's public exposure from these images, the contradiction of how the photographic sessions make me live better with the daily eminence of his death, and how I read the process of editing these images, where everything is clustered in clichés of feelings, dramas and aesthetic propositions.

It is a great contradiction to speak of the urgency of the essential from the point of view of the gradual loss of the essence itself, but it is in this sense that I see that our essence urges convergences and so I allow myself to share this history.