The process through which my paintings are created doesn’t begin with the physical creation of the artwork, it starts way before. It is conditioned by the discovery of an image or place that captivates me and moves me. Most of the time it’s a landscape that catches my attention. I need to observe the theme and memorize it from up close. Also, gather up photographs and sometimes magazines, newspapers and old torn up books that help as a starting point to develop ideas. I don’t care if the images I gather are not high quality. I also don’t care if they aren’t directly related with what I’m working on. Sometimes it’s a texture or just an object, or a paper from the studio that starts acquiring a certain suggestive characteristic of what I’m looking for. Then, a stroke or a spot of paint deform the image in which I’ve decided to work, and that turns out to be even more interesting, more suggestive, because it becomes a strange element that plays an important part in the art piece. What I’m trying to accomplish is to obtain that “strangeness”. I’m trying to make something that isn’t real, and unrelated to the chosen theme. Something that adjusts to the reality of my painting to let the eye convert it into something unavoidable, but fundamental to understanding of the image that I expect to construct.Even today, when I get to do work, I don’t know what it is exactly that invites me to do so. In spite of having great motivation when I start each series, I don’t know in my head how I want to conduct the new artwork pieces. The many different ways the artwork can go makes it a labyrinth at the beginning. Many times, frightened I am unable to continue working on an art piece that I just started on. I believe to have achieved something that I can’t repeat; some kind of signal along the way. At the same time, I find it to be not very solid artwork pieces, so I can’t say they’re finished. It’s just a very special piece of artwork for me. As if that stroke, or that spot of paint was capable of understanding the vital impulse that I have in my head, that directive with which I paint. So then, I take that piece to the side. I look at it, I hide it, and I look at it again for days and days. I reflect on it, and I paint with these thoughts on my mind. Then, suddenly, I realize that I’ve overcome the fear, that I’ve put that piece of artwork behind and that I know how I must continue.
It’s like a way to get even. To pour out what I have in my head on a canvas, over a piece of paper and try to go through the boundary of the obvious through painting. I need for there to be a special stage on the painting, a space that exists in my mind and that at the end is transferred onto the art piece. It’s the enriched and manipulated memory of something that has impressed me. To go into the landscape that makes me paint and to accomplish creating a place that is to be inhabited by it; to paint.
Hugo Fontela