MATEO GODINO

MATEO GODINO
My work begins with the human body and its capacity to express what we are often unable to put
into words. I am interested in anatomy not only as form, but as language: a body can convey
beauty, tension, fear, anger, vulnerability, resilience and strength without revealing who it belongs
to.
In my painting, the body is rarely at rest. It twists, falls, resists, confronts, fragments and
transforms. This movement arises from a struggle that, for me, does not take place against
something external, but within the individual: the human being confronting the self and the mind. It
is a confrontation capable of breaking us down, but also of making us fall, rise again and move
forward transformed.
Although two figures, animals or different presences may appear in a work, for me there is always
only one individual. Everything that appears belongs to that person: different forces, states,
impulses or moments within the same inner struggle.
For this reason, the figures are deliberately stripped of a defined identity. Faces disappear, are
concealed or fragmented. I do not want to portray a specific person or tell a closed story. Painting is
a place where I can deposit my own fears, sensations and emotions and transform them into
images, but I do not want them to remain confined to my personal experience. By erasing identity, I
leave space for others to project their own emotions, conflicts and experiences onto these figures,
and perhaps recognise something of themselves within them.
The exclusive use of black and white is an essential decision in my work. By renouncing colour, I
remove one of painting's most immediate expressive resources and compel myself to seek emotion
through anatomy, light, contrast, materiality and gesture. I am drawn to this self-imposed limitation
precisely because of its difficulty: I want to explore how far the body can go in expressing itself on
its own. I work between the extremes of black and white and through every nuance that exists
between them, just as my figures inhabit spaces between control and loss of control, falling and
resisting, destruction and transformation.
My way of painting reproduces that same tension. Against the control and precision required to
construct the anatomy, I introduce splashes, marks and explosive gestures through a kind of
controlled accident. I can determine the gesture, its force or its direction, but never fully its
outcome. In a matter of seconds, I can transform — or even ruin — many hours or days of work.
Accepting that risk is part of the process.
And that process is never emotionally neutral. I become moved, angry; I suffer, I become frustrated,
and I also experience joy while I paint. I do not try to depict these emotions from the outside: I go
through them and deposit them in the work. In some way, each painting retains something of what
happened to me while I was creating it.
I do not expect the viewer to feel exactly what I felt. I want the work to allow them to find something
of their own. To remain in front of it, to explore it with their eyes, to feel its tension, movement and
energy. I want what emerged from my fears, contradictions or emotions to be capable of awakening
theirs.
For me, a painting is complete when the electricity I feel while creating it finds a new form in the
person who stands before it.