The Third Person in the Room
To stand before this painting is to be dropped into the middle of the story. The air is a deep, electric blue, the colour of a city night or a swimming pool after hours. In this blue, two bodies are locked in an embrace so tight it threatens to blot out everything else. We are close enough to see the hot pink on a fingernail, the cheap yellow of a wristband, the zig-zag pattern on a skirt that seems to vibrate with a life of its own. One figure, clad in a strange, slick black top, holds a turquoise cup with a straw, a detail of such casual normalcy that it makes the intensity of the kiss feel even more like a stolen moment. The embrace is the absolute centre of this world, a knot of feeling and flesh pulled so taut it becomes the painting’s anchor.
And yet, the title is Stalker. The word acts as a frame, instantly recasting the scene. It forces our eyes away from the kiss and toward the left of the canvas, to the thing we might have otherwise missed. There, a third figure lurks. It is a grotesque and unsettling presence, part man, part beast, with what look like bull’s horns sprouting from a distorted head. Its body is a raw scribble of red and black against blue shorts, its form dissolving, ill-made. Is this the stalker? Or does the title implicate us, the viewers, turning our own act of looking into a kind of intrusion? The artist has long been fascinated by the act of watching, in works like the furtive glance of a "Voyeur" or the captured scenes of the "Stolen pic" series. Here, that dynamic turns sinister. The painting refuses to be a simple window onto a private moment; instead, it accuses the very frame that holds it.
This monstrous watcher is not just a narrative device; it is a rupture in the fabric of the painting itself. The kissing couple is rendered with a smooth, confident realism, their bodies solid, their clothes catching a plausible light. The stalker, by contrast, is painted with a clashing violence. It feels less like a figure in the same space and more like a wound in the canvas, a place where the world has gone wrong. It brings to mind the demonic creatures that populate Goya’s Witches' Sabbath, figures that embody a primal terror. But where Goya’s monsters belong to the night of superstition and myth, this one feels chillingly modern, like one of the artist's own "Monstruo del espacio latente (I)" (Monster from the Latent Space) that have clawed their way into reality. It is a bogeyman for the twenty-first century.
What is this new kind of monster made of? Look at the way it is painted: the crude, blocky rendering, the visual noise, the sense of degradation. It looks like a corrupted file, a low-resolution image that has been enlarged past its limits and pasted into a high-definition world. The critic and artist Hito Steyerl, in her essay "In Defense of the Poor Image," described the life of images that are endlessly copied and circulated online, losing quality and gaining a strange new status with each transfer. The stalker is a poor image brought to life in oil paint. It is a ghost from the machine, a spectre born of data, haunting the stubbornly physical world of the canvas. It is the visual trace of a million unseen eyes, the background radiation of a culture of surveillance made flesh.
Made in 2021, the painting carries the echo of a specific historical moment. In a time of enforced distance, when touch was freighted with risk, this depiction of a desperate, public embrace felt like a defiant act of memory and longing. It is a scene of intimacy that knows it is not safe, an island of connection in a sea of ambient anxiety. The joy of the embrace is real, but it cannot fully escape the watcher at the periphery, the ghost at the feast. Like the chaotic energy of the artist’s earlier nocturnal scenes, such as "Fiesta en el parking (I)", this painting understands that no party is entirely private. There is always someone, or something, watching from the edges.
The painting leaves us with this tension. It offers the visceral pleasure of a human connection and, in the same breath, the deep unease of being seen. It argues that perhaps these two things can no longer be separated. The central question is not who is kissing, or even who is watching. The subject is the charged space between them. It is the awareness that every private joy now casts a public shadow, that every embrace happens before a silent, unseen audience. The world dissolves into a deep and uncertain blue, but that turquoise cup remains, held in a steady hand. A small, solid fact in a scene that is coming apart at the seams.