Definitive self-portrait

Since his first exhibition of paintings and mobiles, presented together with Fernando de Szyszlo in Lima in 1948, Jorge Eduardo Eielson tried to incorporate playful elements in modernist representation. In this way he created a visual work that goes beyond the limits of all convention. This painting is part of a series of self-portraits carried out by Eielson between 1981 and 1985. Through this motif the artist explores diverse pictorial forms and techniques to develop images that explore his interest in meditation and shamanism. In fact, the series is presented as the correlation of an introspective process that is reflected in the transformations that the artist’s face experiences in each of the frames of the composition. The diversity of resulting images also responds to an identical variety of technical procedures. For instance, this self-portrait is painted directly onto an unprepared thick fabric and its appearance evokes the colored weavings of the pre-Hispanic coastal cultures. Using the three faces contained in one, Eielson alludes to the ages of man, one of the constant and universal themes in art history.