Colorblind

It’s a painting acrylic on canvas… it’s about identity. About how it feels and how it exists in correspondence with what’s around us (hopefully in symbiosis). Most of the time in this frenetic life we forget it until someone else reminds us we have one, and it’s in that moment who come back to our body. The bodies are both interface and veil, can shows but also hide at the same time in plain sight. The figures are naked but not neutral, each insisting on its difference as pattern emerges, but the feeling of repetition is only an illusion. The bodies in the painting coexist, singularly and in an insistent way.

The title Colorblind is about not seeing the differences, does distinctions that are often used as means of propaganda for hate. A body is a body but its shape, skin tone and context can determine in a very radical way its existence as we have phenonemnas in society like for example pretty privilege or racism or ablism or transphobia in correlation to this differences.

In the painting the colors disappears when we try to see it all at once from distance, then reappear as the different shades are clear when closer to it.

My mum, who is muslim, once joked that “guer” (white people) would walk around naked if they had the chance, it’s just a JOKE but a layer, a little memory that stuck, humorous but also pointing to the way bodies and culture collide, and how we perceive them.

Moving from a village of two thousand people to Amsterdam changed everything. Here, bodies collide in dense, liminal spaces—concerts, stations, malls, raves, tiny historical streets. we dissolve and reform constantly. we slip into the mass, part of a flow, almost invisible, like a drop in an ocean, to be hidden in plain sight. that’s what this painting wants. visible but almost not. present but receding. identity disperses into the rhythm of movement and maybe that’s human—being here and not being seen, all at once.