About PELE

Pele, carried out in 2016, after the discovery, on the web, of a set of documental images about the transformation/recovery of Walter Yeo's face, in what is considered the first plastic surgery intervention, carried out in 1917 by Sir Harold Gillies .

What caught my attention in the documentary images of Walter Yeo's recovery process was the apparent calm with which he posed for the photographic shooting, as if proud of a new beginning, marked by a previous traumatic accident, giving us a feeling of tranquility and hope even when everything was called into question. In other words, the transformation conveyed by the images is not just physical; in these is shown a mental strength, of a man who has to reinvent himself after a physical and, most likely, psychological destruction.

The documentary images of Walter Yeo's recovery are strong, hard, real, forming a mapping of intense and traumatic moments. The small series of 7 paintings that make up the Pele series want to show this, confront the viewer with these strong, traumatic and simultaneously beautiful images, through the feeling of overcoming that Walter Yeo's poses convey.

I am interested in the visual force that these images express and in making them painting, because of the capacity that painting has, unlike images that pass quickly and almost free of charge on the internet, to force a slower observation, of quasi-meditation.