woodcut on elm wood.
20 x 20cm
Mar. 2012
This is the third piece of a project which I developed during the year I stayed in Sweden as an erasmus. The project theme was identity: what makes a person different? what makes each person special? what is an identity made of? why do we have the need to be so unique, yet so integrated in a group? what do we use to define our identity? this are some of the questions that define the proyect.
The idea of working about identity came when I was working on a woodcut project that dealt with life and death...What lasts? Then, I thought about how humans have been signing up since they were humans, from the cave paintings, to craftsmen, artists...even grafittis are signatures.
Signatures have a huge importance, they represent ourselves, they are used to make decisions, to mark, and they last through time, they are used to last. A good example of the great importance of signatures is the anecdote about how Picasso stained someone's trousers (a french ambassador if I recall correctly), and how, instead of being upset, he asked Picasso to sign up the trousers, it was paint in some trousers, but a signature gave them further importance and meaning...I think this also has great importance for the art world, as a piece it's not only important by itself, but who made it.
But signatures usually are written, or nowadays they are just numbers...they can be copied, and they are arbitrary, I don't understand a chinesse signature, and probably my signature won't mean anything to a chinesse. But as humans, we have some characteristics that are common to all of us, but at the same time are unique...One of this characteristics is the finger print: all of us have one, but each person's is slightly different from everybody else, this is even used by the police to track down people.
I thought it's quite funny that one of this unique characteristics is in fact a print, we stamp our finger to get a finger print, So I thought about making a woodcut of my own finger print, and making a stamp, a piece, which is actually my biological signature...And also, making a piece of my signature, is making a piece about myself, about me as an artist, and the importance that may have that I made a piece like this...It also conects with the asiatic style of signing, as far as I know, they have a stamp so their signature is always exactly the same.
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