I was global for a long time. Years of moving everywhere, of belonging to everything and therefore to nothing in particular. At some point, that begins to weigh on you, and the only way out is to dig the other way. Inward, downward, toward where I come from. Painting this way just came out of me. I didn't decide it; it just came out.

I made them from Europe, far from my origin, looking back. A totem isn't copied from a book; it is invoked. These are not replicas of anything. They are what remained inside me of a root I never fully got to know, reconstructed from memory, with what I have and what is missing. The distance is part of the piece. Doing this from Madrid and not from the Americas leaves the brushstroke rough, imprecise, invented. It’s not that I don’t know how. It’s just that the root, seen from afar, looks like this.

The format dictates everything. The totem is a column, an axis, that which connects what is below with what is above. I stack layers of faces because that is what a root is: those who came before, piled on top of each other, holding me up.

I painted them on cardboard. An ancestral sign on the packaging of today's world—that which lasts for centuries on top of that which is thrown away tomorrow. The entire search lies right there. Digging toward what is mine using the only thing the present leaves within my reach.

And searching for balance. The totem is symmetrical; it balances itself, one form on top of another without falling over. After wandering scattered for so long, painting this is a search for the center. Learning to stand up straight again on something that is truly mine.

They don't look outward. They look inward. Just like I am doing now.