SCHANDENMASKE

SCHANDENMASKE (2008-2009)

Along the trajectory of the La Guardia Place series, the structure of the drawing had grown in complexity until it ultimately generated the polysemic matrices (the plurality of the meanings of a message regardless of the nature of the signs that make them up), that were based in the D.A.A. (Dynamic Alfa Alignments) platform. There was a need on the artist’s part to return to a simplification of the web of lines. During several trips, Ciria grouped together a series of drawings in a notebook that would later be titled Box of Mental States. And in this portfolio of barely five dozen drawings, there lies the seed of what would later give rise to the Schandenmaske Masks (Máscaras Schandenmaske) series (2007-2009). The structure became lighter until it was a simple oval that contained the entire scope of the «impact» of the compartmentalized stains while it retained a kind of vertical split in the center of the compositions that created the sensation of a symmetry that was not actually there. Ciria went back to a more expressionistic attitude without escaping from a cell or container, which was the simplified silhouette of the mask.

The title of the Schandenmaske series comes from German, because it is the only language that has the concept of grotesque masks or masks for punishment and mockery. Ciria wanted to distance himself from the possibility that the masks might be interpreted as merely festive or carnivalesque masks of concealment. «Behind the mask there is nothing.»