We exist in a state of permanent attention.

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And yet, each day we become more distracted from ourselves.

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“Atento” emerges from that wound: attention as contested territory, and the ongoing assault that mass technology exerts on our perception, our time, and our identity. The digital era does not only capture data; it captures gazes, captures pulses, captures subjectivities. It names us “users,” and in that gesture, it reduces us.

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I declare myself in resistance to that reduction.

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These portraits were conceived virtually, gestated within an algorithmic space where faces can be infinite and, paradoxically, interchangeable. But they do not remain there. I transfer them onto canvas using tempera—one of the oldest techniques in painting—to restore friction, materiality, and silence. Against the luminous immediacy of the screen, I place the slowness of ground pigment, the layer that dries over time, the surface that demands proximity.

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This is not nostalgia; it is critical friction.

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Each man and woman represented embodies visible and invisible differences: contexts, histories, corporealities, nuances. They are reminders that behind every interface lies a complex life that cannot be contained within metrics or consumption patterns. Diversity here is not a trend; it is an ontological affirmation. It is the refusal to accept that humanity can be homogenized under the functional category of “user.”

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“Atento” demands that we pause.
To attend is a political act.
To sustain a gaze is an ethical one.

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If technology undermines our depth by fragmenting and accelerating us, painting proposes a counter-rhythm: to contemplate, to remain, to recognize. This pictorial body does not compete with the digital image; it moves through it and reconfigures it. It returns it to the realm of the human.

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To be attentive is no longer simply to pay attention.
It is to resist.