Sunset Whispers, 2021

Adán López Alemán  

"I have coined the term “Soul Painting” to describe my work. In order to define this concept, I will first have to mention another term.

“The collision”. Every time I embark on the artistic process when painting a new portrait, at a certain moment, the presence of the person portrayed becomes inevitable. That point at which the change occurs from being a canvas that has pigment deposited on it, to being a person with a soul who is present in my studio, I call “The Collision”. There is no given moment of the collision to any particular part of the creative process. In some pictures, it can occur early and in others almost at the end. So I have come to the conclusion that the level of detail doesn’t play a part at all. It is something that I do intuitively and can’t be explained with already established rules.

When we paint portraits, we are talking about more than just the technique and support we use. For me, a portrait is not about painting a face, it is about painting the soul. If I only tried to portray the features of a face or the forms of a body, the viewer would never be moved by my work. The key is to transmit an emotion, a feeling. First, you have to feel the work and then you can understand it. It is this approach that I always try to make with each work I create.

When I realised that the people who observed my work always agreed that they could feel a force coming from the canvas, I decided to call my work “Soul Paintings”."