Every day of my life I wake up trying to find answers to questions that, as white little bunnies, multiply rapidly and with exponential rapture. The thoughts, like a sticky crowd, huddle together and overlap, eager to offer remedies that reveal their candor in an instant.  Barren is the search undertaken by my mind on this uncontrollable urge of apprehending the fathomless and controlling the chaos. I find myself spinning on my own labyrinth of mirrors, stepping on my objections, on a convulsive battle between fragments of myself. Then my left hand starts moving. And with strokes it lulls my restless existence, searching within its figurations some answer or, why not, a new question. That’s how this dialectic dance begins, sometimes harmonic, sometimes violent, sometimes elusive, sometimes much clearer, amongst these split beings that inhabit me, which embody my fears and longings, secrets and confessions, and in this simple, but at the same time complex act of alchemy it generates, if only for a magical instant, a unifying, pacifying, integrating fusion of all my being and the universe which, for moments, threatens to break it all up.

 

Thus, my works present themselves as frames of that internal search. Lonely characters, imaginary beings, nature in motion or in rebellion, internal screaming, energy leaks, pagan gods, and symbols of peace and fury. Everything that moves me and crushes me or drives me finds its place. Mine is a work which I find to be very personal and, at one time, collective, as my daily experiences connect me with a network of common or shared sufferings. And with ‘sufferings’ I do not mean the common use of the word, but the meaning that, in line with Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, connects it with everything that marks us or affects us, for better or for worse. That is how my own experience works as the vessel which allows me to travel through the river of the Universal, in an effort to engender imaginary bridges with The Whole which, otherwise, would be inaccessible to me.   

 

My paintings and drawings are sparkles of that conflict, as they crystallize thoughts of redemption, anger, quietness, introspection, illusion, impotence. I use them as an exercise in an attempt to comprehend that which is mine and that which is foreign, of materializing with lines what’s indescribable, to own the hope that shines through a symbol, of integrating and loving and embellishing all that dreaded darkness that has so little marketing in a time of filters and design personalities.

 

Sometimes an urge feeds off the tangled and the overwhelming, sometimes it requires synthesis and stridency. Moments of noise and fury, of silence and calmness. And in that need, different pictorial frameworks keep emerging, which I sometimes find to be beautiful. An antibody for madness or a search for the light, enchantment or despair, all that I go through and echoes on my works, finds its own way of being said and seen, always one step ahead of me, always teaching me to look at myself indifferent ways and revealing to me all those things which sometimes I’d rather be, but sometimes, maybe not.​

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BEBY FIGUERERO