About Lines, Mistakes and Absences

Travelling by feet in deep Brazil I could visit seven small villages lost in the middle of nothing.

There I started to produce portraits. After some work, I realized that portraits were not enough to show the real face of those places.

Then I could see the tight relation between walls and skin of local people. As skin body, walls gets scars and spots, telling a particular history of life. This gets more power when I realized that, because of poverty, everybody paints their own home with their own hands. That creates walls that show to others the kind of appearance as locals wish to be seen by others. It´s a beauty ideal. Even poorest people try to do the same kind of painting, with a line dividing the middle of the wall, using rests of pigments, normally a donation from others (with a little bit more of money).

The work is a close capture of those walls, hand painted by locals, with digital camera.

As a mode to portrait that way of life, the portraits were replaced by images of those particular walls. For me, that is a way to portrait too.