Pepe's double portrait.

In the last weeks of 2013 I painted a symbolic double portrait of my friend José Javier from photos. It's an acrylic painting on wood.

If the ancient Roman artists carved the heads of their emperors and used bodies lent as models for the rest of the picture, why couldn't I use such a licence? Pepe's body is Vertumnus' body, that Pontormo painted in the villa in Poggio a Caiano for the Medici.

 

Vertumnus is an etruscan god who protects the fields and presides over the changing of the seasons. Pontormo painted him as an old peasant.

One of the facets I wanted to reflect was Pepe's love of the land (the land also as roots, as origin and, therefore, a symbol of the mother) and his generosity (which so often takes the form of gifts of fruit and flowers from his fields and his country), hence the choice of the character of Pontormo (whom I greatly admire).

Another facet, his passion for art, but also his rejection of any kind of intellectual pomposity or pedantry, which arouse in him an immediate reaction of mockery or irony (I wonder what he will think of these paragraphs!). For that I painted the background image, taken from a photo in which he appears in that pose with a bronze sculpture at the entrance of a museum in Toulouse.