COMBATANTS Series: DRAWINGS

I didn't live through the civil war, but the war lives on in me. This series was born from a silent but persistent need: to look to the past to understand the present, to name it with a different voice. Painting wasn't an aesthetic choice; it was an act of memory, of empathy, of reunion. I began with familiar, iconic images. Capa's militiaman, the child from the ghetto... But I soon understood that the truest emotion lay not in the universal, but in the intimate, in the fragile, in what barely left a trace in the archives. That's how I came to those poorly scanned home photos of anonymous soldiers, armed women, children staring blankly. I lingered over them like someone who finds such photos in a forgotten box. Each painting is an untold story, a presence that resists oblivion. I didn't want to idealize or dramatize. I painted the gestures that moved me: a smile with a rifle, a screaming mother, a child with his hands raised, nuns with weapons. Human oxymorons. Contradictions that define us. The blur isn't just formal. It's the echo of a dissolving memory. It's the attempt to capture what is no longer there. I painted with an unanswered question: What remains when history erases names?

This series doesn't aim to chronicle the war, but rather to give a face to those who lived through it without wanting to be part of it. Combatants , yes. But above all, human beings.