When I decided to fill a wall with angry women, it was out of curiosity. I wanted to know what I would feel when faced with a wall full of such a powerful emotion, so repressed in many women.
Angry people, not the ones who get angry well, but the ones with anger embedded in their bodies, give me stomach aches.
But pure anger, the kind that surges like a wave through the body when something is wrong and brings about changes for the better, inspires me.
With my angry women I wanted to know if I was capable of representing pure and powerful anger. But I soon learned that I can’t. My paintings, perhaps because I am the one painting them and my emotions are mixed, tend towards scrambled anger.
I have also noticed that anger mixed with fear or pain is scarier. Pure anger, if I ever achieve to convey it in a painting, is a bit psychotic. And before such a person, there is nothing to do. Just run. Anger mixed with disappointment is much more interesting, and human.
For each woman I paint, I invent a world of ancestral traumas and life circumstances. Through them I try to access my own anger, not the one I feel when something I don’t like happens, I notice that without problem, but the one I have hidden somewhere in my DNA. The anger that goes unnoticed because of the centuries of residual injustices transmitted from generation to generation. Also my own repressed anger, which remains as an unwanted guest in the tissues of my body.
Luckily for my family, painting these pictures full of anger, frustration, and rage is hard for me. They are coming out in drops. I need to rest a lot between each painting and paint pretty things to recover. So it will take me a long time to fill a wall with angry women.
But it does not matter. I suspect that I paint as exorcism. It may be that by cleaning slowly, it cleans better.