Verses on slates

 Verses on slates:

This work began in 1999, and it has not finished yet.

I printed several photos and sentences over different kinds of paper and fabric and glued them over slates.  I  took these pieces from covering a roof. They are self-portraits pasted on my family members’ portraits.

I glued it in layers one over another,  erased it partially by the time or rubbing. I have placed them to a fine-grained black metamorphic rock easily split into smooth, flat pieces. The images and support lose layers,  like the text.  It is stripped of words and seeks to complete its meaning with the other layers of phrases.

I enjoy working on photographs, considering them both as representations of something objects turn with their corporeity this way. Their deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, forgetting, and memory.

Visually they remind me of Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings. The artist recycles an American collective memory into alternative narratives disengaged from a linear history. These ethereal drawings reclaim scraps of printed media combined with hand-drawn and painted passages. I did it to make pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work would depict my self-representations along time and my aging process..

Slates paradoxically seem to me paleolithic mobile screens with their messages on social Networks.