Overpainted photos by Enriquillo Amiama and Herminio Alberti
I am a fan of Gerhard Richter and his painted photos.
It is an art form that he and Anselm Kiefer took to extraordinary levels.
For my next individual exhibition, I decided to invite the photographer Herminio Alberti León. He makes some extraordinary macro photographs, where he decontextualizes reality and turns it into “other worlds.”
Yes, his images unfold and seem to belong to dystopian universes. I like it better when it focuses on spatial geometry and plasma spheres, converging angles, or all kinds of lines lost in infinity.
That was usually my forte in school and university, mathematics and exact sciences.
My art style
Since 1982 I have been immersed in exploring natural and abstract worlds, combining them in paintings and drawings, compositions based on geometric elements have been the ideal support.
Reality is sometimes abstract, and abstraction is often found in the facts. Think of the veins of a leaf? Or in a detail of a wall? Everything is real and abstract at the same time!
I have chosen Herminio’s photos. First, I review the more than five hundred photographs he has published on his Instagram. Then refine the search, and I selected forty semi-finalists until finally reaching twelve. Although right now, the number will be higher.
The relationship with my paintings is in the geometry already mentioned.
Cézanne, the father of modern painting, based his masterful compositions on reducing everything to the cube, sphere, and cone, basic or essential geometric shapes with volume.
With them, we can build everything.
Already having a bridge or connecting element –the similarity or compositional affinity– then comes the most subjective, creative, or daring part: to intervene those photos with paint. What to paint that can be related to my other works?
The art process
I’m on it. As I do with my paintings, I first design free sketches on the PC, in which I give free rein to my imagination based on the realistic base provided by the photographs.
The ease of rehearsing, retracing your steps, or saving a sketch for future modifications keeps the creativity flowing freely. I wish there were an undo or delete button in paint!
The date of the expo at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo is approaching, and far from discouraging us, the emotion grows, and the daring is greater.
Some of these hybrid pieces will probably later become NFT, the fever that broke out in the art world just over a year ago. We’ll see!
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