Pinacoteca Pantitlán Series 6 - 2023

Pinacoteca Pantitlán Series 6 is an ongoing series of seven paintings on canvas. They’re more challenging than the oil-on-panel paintings, also part of the Pinacoteca.

The first was finished in early 2023 and the others have continued since then. There is a diorama quality to life in Mexico City that lends itself to painting. In some cases, when the Google Street View car is passing, the subjects have braced themselves to be photographed. In others, they’re entirely oblivious. In every case, there is a theatrical quality that one can discover, when walking physically, or barreling through on Street View.

Life carries on irrespective of those documenting it, or trying to tease out a moment of candid vital insight. Such an insight can mean simply a human connection, some profound empathy, or it could mean that we’re surprised at the beauty and longing we sense in people we’d otherwise ignore. Goffman’s Civil Inattention is respected by the wandering camera whose subjects are carefully anonymized. Usually it’s a computer program that blurs faces along with license plate numbers. Here and there, within the millions of Street View images, one will find that a human hand has anonymized, rather more heavily, certain photographic frames. Depicted here, they’re not individuals, and thus hardly portraits. But they do play a role of historic interest and humane understanding while so much of art and media focuses on the bizarre, the lucrative, and the attention seeking.

What I’ve tried to do is to respect the subjects as people, and to portray their context and their socio-economic reality in a light that aligns with our historic understanding of the present. The continuity seems noteworthy.