El eco del otro
José Luis Ceña
by Adonay Bermúdez
Flee to the hidden! And have your mask and subtlety to confuse you with others! I am afraid of you!1
[…]
Everything deep loves the mask.2
Before becoming a concept associated with modern thought, the mask was a ritual, theatrical and symbolic instrument: a threshold between what we are and what we can incarnate. In it coexist simultaneously concealment and revelation, fear and desire, fiction and truth. Perhaps that is why Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it an inseparable image of human depth. For Nietzsche, what really matters is never presented transparently; it needs detour, innuendo, artifice. There is no pure “I” waiting behind appearances, because we are also what we represent, what we imagine and what others perceive of us. The mask then works not as a lie, but as a form of revelation. Everything deep, as Nietzsche wrote, loves the mask because it understands that there are truths that can only appear in the form of play, fiction or disguise.
Photo of the inauguration
This conception is especially fertile to approach the new pictorial series of José Luis Ceña (Malaga, 1982), where childhood appears as a territory of identity experimentation. The children portrayed by the artist cover their faces with animal masks that, far from canceling individuality, expand their symbolic possibilities. Here the mask does not erase identity, but opens up new ways of inhabiting it. “To show one’s face is certainly not to show oneself.”3 Ceña’s painting seems to intuitively assume that Nietzschean assertion that the deep needs appearance in order to exist.
Childhood takes on a particularly revealing dimension here. The child, before being fixed by the normative structures of adult life, still inhabits a space where identity and fiction are not radically separated, if at any time they become so. As Jacques Lacan pointed out, human reality is always articulated between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real4. The game then functions as a form of exploration: playing involves rehearsing possible ways of existing. In this sense, the animal masks present in the work do not refer only to the playful imagination, but also to an archaic and ritual condition of representation. The animal face allows us to cross the boundaries of the human and explore a subjectivity still open, mutable and in the process of formation.
Photo of the inauguration
As long as man and animals are regarded as independent creations, it is certain that an invincible obstacle will paralyze the efforts of our natural curiosity to carry as far as possible the search for the causes of expression.
[…]
Various expressive movements in the dog. — Cat. — Horse. — Ruminants. — Monkeys — Expressions of joy and affection, suffering, anger, admiration and terror in these animals. 6
In Ceña’s work, the animal functions as a sensitive extension of that which still remains outside of language. Each figure embodies an emotional intensity — cunning, vulnerability, strength, fear, tenderness, or violence — that belongs not exclusively to the human, but to a shared zone of sensitivity. In this sense, the masks do not work as simple children’s costumes, but as elements that expand the identity game and allow to explore emotions difficult to express in another way. Darwin already sensed that emotions traverse different species and bodies, revealing a profound continuity between the human and the animal. Ceña places precisely there the core of his painting: in that ambiguous territory where identity is still under construction, exposed and open to change. His images represent not only masked children, but the persistence of a primitive truth: that there is a silent continuity between the human and the animal.
Photo of the inauguration
Ceña’s painting intensifies this reflection through a decisive element: space. The characters do not appear located in recognizable scenarios or naturalistic landscapes, but in ambiguous architectures, suspended in uncertain temporality. These are backgrounds that seem to be built from the memory of ancient painting and, at the same time, from the conscious artificiality of the theater. There is something of Giotto’s symbolic frontality and also something of the scenography: backdrops, platforms, minimal architectures and deliberately unstable perspectives that turn each image into a representation. Ceña does not seek to reproduce the world, but to build the place where fiction can happen.
Impossible forests, suspended vegetation, disproportionate fungi and cardboard architectures build a universe where the real is displaced towards the terrain of fable and reverie. And it is precisely the trace of our artist that reinforces this ambiguous condition. The image seems to oscillate constantly between construction and dissolution: carefully modeled areas coexist with open fragments, transparent stains and overlays that leave visible the painting process itself. That formal instability prevents the scene from closing completely, maintaining the feeling of something still happening or transforming before the gaze.
Thus, animal masks, children’s bodies and fictional scenarios end up forming the same symbolic structure: identity understood not as a fixed essence, but as a representation in permanent construction. Ceña seems to remind us that all subjectivity has some theatricality, some ritual and some playfulness. And perhaps that is where the silent depth of these paintings lies: in understanding that there is no human truth completely separate from the fiction that makes it visible.
As in certain childhood dreams that, without warning, drift into the unsettling, Ceña’s scenes keep the viewer suspended in a strange emotional instability. Nothing ends up offering refuge: neither the apparent tenderness of bodies, nor play, nor fantasy. Each composition seems to contain a silent fissure, a latent tension that disorients the gaze and constantly shifts the sense. The familiar becomes strange; the near, inaccessible. There is a dreamlike logic in these paintings where the proportions falter, the spaces do not settle and the figures seem trapped in an instant before the disappearance or awakening. Perhaps that is why his images remain attached to memory: like all true masks, they do not completely conceal or reveal, but leave the viewer facing the disturbing experience of not knowing exactly which face he is looking at.
Though a two-faced man, I was by no means a hypocrite: my two aspects were genuinely sincere.7
Adonay Bermúdez
Bibliography:
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Editorial Alliance. Madrid, 2012, p 62. 2.Nietzsche, op. cit., p 82. 3. De Diego, Estrella: It's not me. Editions Siruela. Madrid, 2011, p 63. 4. I symbolize you, the imaginary you are. Lecture given by Jacques Lacan at the Amphitheater of the Psychiatric Hospital of Sainte-Anne, Paris, on July 8, 1953, on the occasion of the first scientific meeting of the newly founded Société Fran ç aise de Psychanalyse 5. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Francisco Sempere and Ca, Editors. Valencia, 1845, p 18. 6. Darwin, op. cit., p 147. 7. Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Austral. Madrid, 2008, p 120.