HOLIDAY ME

PAYASOY / Clown Me

Holiday Me is an ongoing series of self-portraits created SINCE 2022. Rather than attempting to reproduce the artist’s physical appearance, the paintings imagine the self through color, distortion, disguise and play.

Each figure is another possible “me”: clown, mask, apparition, animal, ceremonial being, comic performer or unnamed companion. Faces divide into incompatible colors. Eyes move out of alignment. Bodies become costumes, landscapes or abstract structures. Identity does not remain fixed long enough to become a definitive portrait. It appears instead as a succession of temporary forms.

The Spanish title PAYASOY joins payaso—clown—with soy—I am. Its English counterpart, Clown Me, preserves the title’s playfulness rather than translating it literally. Holiday Me names the condition that makes these transformations possible: a self released from ordinary identity and permitted to enter a private carnival.

Humor is central to the series, but it does not eliminate vulnerability. The clown can celebrate, exaggerate, conceal, expose or ridicule. Through this unstable figure, self-portraiture becomes less an act of recognition than an experiment in becoming.

Each painting is made with oil on woven gardening weed barrier fabric. The oil is worked into the open support with short-cut brushes, allowing color to pass through the material. The reverse remains raw and uncovered. Marks, stains and traces of the frontal composition can therefore be seen from behind, giving every painting a material second face.

Across the series, painting becomes a holiday from resemblance—a place where the self can multiply without having to settle into a single image.