Art Book
I approached the Illustrated Album, also known as Picture Book, with the idea of taking a course and expanding my knowledge about something that I had only experienced visually. So I wanted to make my own illustrated book on a specific topic that I still have pending. When I discovered the true spirit of this type of book and the narrative possibilities of the illustration as the heart, the common thread of the narration through the serial organization of the images, I was trapped. It was a profound experience in many dimensions and since then illustration has reaffirmed itself as an alphabet in my work.
Telling stories has been, since I was a child, one of my passions; although my studies were specified in the field of social sciences, the storytelling, perhaps, became an unconscious resource that allowed me to transcend the horizon of the strictly rational. Through the dance between images and texts I can fly, inhabit other parallel spaces.
The illustrations with techniques subordinated to the narrative purpose, are the fundamental condiment of what I call the “Fusion Book”, an experiment that fuses the Illustrated Album and the Art Book and that is an essential part of my present work.
Autorretrato
"Autorretrato" -selfportrait- is a Fusion Book between the Album Book or Illustrated Album, and the Art Book. This decision made at the beginning of the project allowed me to weave a narrative through serial illustrations and, at the same time, have the freedom and spontaneity of the Artist's Book. After working on a "Storyboard", a process that takes me almost as long as the making of the book, I took on the task of looking for materials, textures, objects that would represent the fabric of the road. At the same time, I was drawing each illustration with basic techniques, pencils and a few acrylic colors that were mostly faint on the surface. At the end of the book that is presented in accordion form, I wrote a letter. The work was selected by the curatorship of the ArtFlow Gallery, San José, Costa Rica, for the Collective Exhibition "Self-portrait" in April 2019. Submit an Art Book, instead of a painting as most of the artists did on that occasion It was thanks to Karen Clachar, friend and owner of the Gallery. She knew about my work in the area of the Illustrated Album, the Artist's Book and the Notebooks, so her suggestion became a work that combines the passion for narrating, the encounter with myself and chance. I am left with the challenge of opening "new volumes".
El Hombre detrás del Cartel.
"Cuadro a cuadro" was a collective exhibition of Mexican and Costa Rican engravers. Each of the Costa Rican participants presented an art book, three 30 X 30 cm engravings, and a self-portrait with the transfer technique. It was about honoring the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. The poster always seemed to me a formidable artistic expression of Mexican cinema. When I began to investigate the most outstanding ones, I found that most of them were made by Josep Renau, a Valencian who, in addition to his outstanding photo-montage work, was the one who commissioned the Guernica from Picasso. My fascination for his work in Mexico and later in Germany, with the series known as "Fata Morgana", or "American Way of Life", led me to put together an Art Book in honor of his work with the spirit of the Illustrated Album. Hence the "reader" can put together your own story.
Irreverentes
"Irreverentes" is an Art Book part of the project of the same name. It was presented in digital format in the individual exhibition held at Chiasso Perduto - artistic residencies and experimental exhibitions - in Florence, Italy, in August 2023. Digital collages, texts, and inside covers that collect photos of women who left traces in history, present as a whole different points of view of a controversial garment, the corset; with the presence of two protagonists who walk through the pages of the book, the dragonfly and the scissors.
