Memento Mori 1.0

MEMENTO MORI 1.0
Every series begins with a single act of courage.
Not the courage to make something beautiful — that comes later, with practice. The courage to look at what you are actually interested in and decide to follow it without knowing where it leads. To put a skull at the centre of a painting and let it be exactly what it is — not softened, not ironic, not distanced behind layers of concept. Present. Direct. Looking back.
This is where the series began.
The skull of Memento Mori 1.0 is rendered in black and white with the particular precision of someone who wanted to get it right before they started complicating it — every cavity, every surface, every hollow drawn with the patient attention of an artist who understood that you have to earn the right to play with a symbol before you can transcend it. Around it, flowers and coloured geometric elements erupt in reds, blues and golds — the world at its most vivid, life at its most insistent, pressing in from every side against the central truth that cannot be argued with.
No crown yet. No halo. No crossbones or compass.
Just the skull, and the flowers, and the question that every subsequent work in this series has been an answer to: what does it mean that both of these things — the vitality and the ending — occupy the same frame?
In Tana Toraja they already knew. In Mexico on the Day of the Dead they already knew. In every cemetery in Spain on the first of November, when families arrive with fresh flowers for the dead, they already know. Death and life are not opposites. They are the same conversation, seen from different ends.
This is where that conversation started.
A3 (29.7 × 42 cm) · Acrylic on wood panel · 2024 · One of a kind Unframed. Signed and titled on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.