ADAN LÓPEZ ALEMÁN

“I have coined the term “Soul Painting” to describe my work. To define this concept, I will first have to mention another term.

“La colisión”. Every time I embark on the artistic process by painting a new portrait, at a certain point, the presence of the person portrayed becomes unavoidable. That point at which the shift occurs from being a canvas with pigment deposited on it, to being a person with a soul present in my studio, I call “La colisión”. There is no specific moment of collision anywhere in the creative process. In some images, it may occur early and in others near the end. So I’ve come to the conclusion that the level of detail plays no role. It’s something I do intuitively and can’t be explained by established rules.

When we paint portraits, we are talking about more than just the technique and the support we use. For me, a portrait is not about painting a face, it’s about painting the soul. If I only tried to portray the features of a face or the shapes of a body, the viewer would never be moved by my work. The key is to convey an emotion, a feeling. First, you have to feel the work and then you can understand it. It is this approach that I always try to achieve with every work I create.

When I realized that people who looked at my work always agreed that they could feel a force coming from the canvas, I decided to call my work “Pinturas del Alma”.”