ARA

Ara is a series of limited-edition digital prints with hand-applied gold leaf.

It uses images from my Blossoming series of paintings to reinterpret them, transferring these works to paper and on a significantly smaller scale than the works used as a reference.

Ara, in Spanish, means altar. Of Latin origin, as a fundamental part of our language, this word describes the part of the temple, whatever it may be, intended for ceremonial or ritual purposes.

Ara brings the floral world, which my Blossoming series explores in a more analytical and neutral way, one step closer to what we might consider a tribute to Nature and its universal and transcendental essence.

It draws on the religious-spiritual iconography of the Renaissance. To do so, it replaces the religious figures of those Renaissance altars with floral images.

The gold leaf creates the context or environment in which the protagonist of the scene, the flower, appears. In doing so, it elevates it to a new dimension by enveloping it in a kind of aura that connects it with eternity and divinity. This eternity and divinity have historically been inspired by gold in almost every culture on the planet, given its scarcity, permanence, and immutability.

Ara, as an edition, also allows us to construct an alternative vision of graphic work in use.

While sharing the aspiration of seriality and accessibility in relation to the unique work, it seeks to create its own space for reinterpretation. Ara constitutes a corpus of serial work in very exclusive print runs, both in terms of the number of copies and the individual manual intervention of each copy by my own hand. This elevates each copy to the category of a unique piece despite its common roots with the rest of the edition.