Intensely intertwined with my personal experiences, the Pilgrim is an artistic project developed and perfected over 13 years. Born in 2009 after witnessing the death of a friend and the excruciating pain of his parents, I began this life-long research on the theme of death and love as complementary and opposing entities. Studies in psychology, mysticism, myth and history of art are blended together with my deepest feelings and self-reflective analysis and contribute to build the multi-layered meaning behind the artwork. Mirroring my own quest for the truth and the divine, I chose to create an artist's book inspired by the Campbellian “hero's journey”, where the story unravels in a form of a fairy tale guiding the pilgrim through dark and perils, through love and revelation towards the enlightenment, appealing a metaphor to one’s inner child.
The mystical images painted and the written text, complete each other in creating a modern myth which acts as an oracle, a medium to seek advice from the divinity. The book is imbued with symbolic references that plunge their roots into different mythologies, especially Greek-Roman. It follows a Dantesque three-parted structure: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and its 22 chapters represent the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot. Numerology plays a key part in structuring the symbolic references of The Pilgrim. An example can be seen in the beginning with the first unnumbered image of the book which refers to The Fool in the Tarot de Marseille: a symbolic choice to express the beginning of the journey. Along this line, the titles of the paintings are usually single, latin words and they generally have references to Jungian themes, mostly archetypes or scientific terms related to unconscious aspects such as numen.
Making the most of this empirical investigation and taking advantage of my privileged position as an artist, I use this creative power to reach for the essence of life and demonstrate how love is stronger than death, aiming to guide all the other pilgrims through their personal struggles.
Also, the whole artwork is a final loving homage to Fernando and Rodica, the parents of my friend, in an attempt to heal their pain whilst acknowledging the universality of their suffering.
