Landscape with Carbon Offset

I was a very young boy when I was stunned by a machine in a store: a typewriter with an LCD segment display. It was tangible proof of a dream future, then called "the year 2000", which would bring us flying cars and helpful humanoid robots. I grew up and organized my professional and creative life inhabited by this childhood fascination for the marvels of technology. You have to mature enough to understand when adhering to these promises of a benevolent and playful future makes you a devoted consumer. I broke later with this utopia of abundance, ease and technological comfort, not without difficulty; Having become a critic of my own desires, I now live with this torment: our energy to build carries our own demise.

There are those gurus whom we love to revere, those makers of jewels, pleasures and riches, who chant the promise of our individual happiness in technological progress. These make solutions up that stir up the very problem. "Always control your speed," said the driving instructor; today no one knows how to brake.

Everything I create today is inhabited by this doubt and this guilt, in the realization that my innocent pleasure of creating depens on what fuels our race towards disaster.

Yet energy is the engine of men. Art has this kind of energy, charismatic and unifying. If I believe little in technology to save humanity, I keep hope in humanity, in its conscience, in the universality of its love. If only one power is given to artists, it is that of being able to touch, sometimes, the hearts of men, and in this sense, I have this duty to continue to try.

“Landscape with carbon offset” is an honest critique of my own consciousness as an artist working with technology. The canvas where the desire to explore new forms of art is expressed, will always remain stained with the hydrocarbons that I participated in burning ; the technological solutions that we place our faith in are barely more than ways to wash away our guilt. For these reasons, through the hard times, more than ever, we need beauty in our lives.