Statement

While I paint the skin of two male bodies that hug, I realise that touch is an experience too difficult to hold. It fades away once it’s over. Can I recover the experience of touch in painting? 

If painting is something, it is something you are not allowed to touch. 

How do I translate the skin that I touch, the feel of skin into another surface? When I paint, sometimes I think that I am touching.

That's indeed what I’m doing. At the bottom of the work that’s what a painter does,to touch, not to look. Or to touch through the eyes, but that’s not as obvious as I’d like. To look is just a consequence of touch.

I want the bodies that I paint to be as meaty as I feel them, not as dreams or memories I want you to desire them.

José Sarmiento