PORTRAITS

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In this series of paintings, Luis Fernando Ponce revisits an ancient Renaissance tradition: the “portrait,” its meaning, and his own aims within it.

A way to transcend time as humans, objects, or individuals—bearers of ideas and abstract feelings yet endowed with strong personality. This body of work reveals its own message, enveloped in mystery, melancholy, and a touch of satire. The black and white of each pictorial layer employed by Luis Fernando suspends us in a specific moment, one filled with abstractions, visual languages, and torn gestures.

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Certain social elements can be recognized, among them marginality, silence, depression, discrimination, violence, and anger, among others—experiences that many of us encounter daily in our environments yet often render invisible out of habit. Ponce invites us to appreciate each of these characters, to enter into them, into their various veils, to generate an intimate dialogue with the figure, and to deconstruct it if necessary.

 

This journey through images—shaped by the portrait traditions of the early 16th and 17th centuries—is, without a doubt, composed of contemporary personal memories. They reveal us as individuals, confronting us with or without a direct gaze, yet always with emotions of their own that may root us in wonder within each of them.

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Guatemala, March 2022.