Armando y Genoveva

I remember seeing my father perched over a table, drawing over glass with his finger.

 

A glass fogged with colors.

 

He would place a piece of paper carefully over the glass and pad it with a spoon.  I was two or three years old.

 

Instants later, my father would raise the piece of paper from the glass.  A miracle would occur: in the paper, strange beings with aggressive teeth and sad eyes would appear.

 

I soon learned this “miraculous” procedure: it was called mono-printing.

 

I look at these works now: cheerful and threatening, allegorical and monstrous masks, and I can’t help but find in them the characters of my first nightmares. . . 

 

There are many references to theater in the series of mono-prints, perhaps also literary ones: did my father believe that humanity staged a pathetic or tragic scene? As cheerful and desperate clowns?  As ghosts in disguise?

 

I also find that, despite their somber content. . .the mono-prints seem full of joy.  I see the self-confidence of a young artist who believes in himself firmly and irreverently.

 

The mono-prints are dated, catalogued and even provisionally framed by my father.  The care devoted to this series of works makes me infer that, although my father earned a living as a construction worker at the time, and we lived under miserable conditions, his artistic aspirations remained intact.

 

In 1971, my father was a young artist in his thirties, and held fervent political and artistic ideals.

 

Later, the harsh reality of the dictatorship, compounded by years of frustration and marginality, would perhaps change his vision of the figure.  Actors would forget their roles, and ghosts would lose their masks.