Artist Statement

Everything is dual and sooner or later every moment of pleasure is followed by its opposite. If you ever fall in love, one day that love may end, or at least change. As if every second of happiness or ecstasy is responsible to immediately pass it on and charge us with some pain to pay off and vice versa. Often, exciting things become tedious after a while – the time a good hug lasts is minimal, friendships fade away, after a holiday one has to return to work, and abundance of health, self-esteem, libido or fashion trends comes and goes. And loving grandparents die.

Surrounded by everything desirable and always disowned from a lasting satisfaction, we live dragging an unfathomable void. Being thirsty, starving.

“In this material existence, there is no happiness,” said the sadhu, “true and complete bliss, calm, and peace belong only to the spiritual world.”
And how could one reach this transcendental dimension loaded with borrowed emotions, bones, entrails, and mud? or if not, how could we settle for staying here?
Each painting is an instant of tightrope walking, of an impossible balance between realities where the material and tangible and the transcendental are unfolding and coexisting simultaneously. We find ourselves at some meeting points where, thanks to chanting, the spiritual path, sacred traditions, spiritual masters, prayers or intimate whispers to the divine, open up a gap and communicate both realities in the eternal quest towards the Absolute.

ELVIRA MARTOS