“We Are Anxious For Each Other, But We Cannot Reach Him”

The phrases that Enrique Baeza exposes in the public space begin to gain diffusion: “Hope creates silence”, “Peace, but revolution”, “Be careful with shortcuts” … and others that he prefers not to translate from English: “Trauma is the map ”,“ Reality is spam ”,“ Sustainable selfdestruction ”… This artist now creates personalized portraits investigating in the words of the interviewee an idea on which his whole world gravitates and then turns it into a neon.

How was the experience of showing your messages on the streets of New York?
I believe that people have more capacity than is sometimes believed to absorb abstract and intelligent messages. With the phrases on the canopies he asked passersby: What do you think about “Fear is a hologram” or “The economy is the new fiction”? I listened to very interesting things, which surprised everyone: the gallery owners, those who sponsored me, myself …

What did it mean to pass, with your portraits in words, from that broad audience to an individual one?
Writing for one person involves a very powerful and transformative dialogue, for her and for me. I learn a lot and the portrait always provides a very intimate moment, of great closeness to the other.

What do you offer the person?
Although it may not seem like it, we are very aware of our fears and our miseries and very little of our beauty and of what we do well. I look for a relevant and beautiful idea in the person related to his potential. With neon I code and offer what I have seen.

I look for a relevant and beautiful idea in the person related to their potential.

How do they receive it?
People are often shocked: they cry, fall asleep, ask for a blanket in the middle of August … They are cathartic reactions, like stupor. For me there has to be a very physical shock, otherwise the message does not work, even with people who were undaunted or who were not affected by the questions.

What do you usually fixate on?
What is really important can be an inflection of the voice, how the person says something, how he looks, a specific word …

Why did you choose neon?
Neons fascinate me since I was a child. I chose neon because it is word and light. A neon is very different off than on, during the day than at night. Allows you to mark important things. I focus them on the emotional sphere. I would like them to serve for each person to remember a very valuable part of themselves.

Neons fascinate me since I was a child. I chose neon because it is word and light

What happens when the neon lights up?
It is a marvel, a little catharsis. It is a ritual and the culmination of a long process.

How do you see communication in today’s world?
Information and political debates are a smokescreen, ideologically directed and confusing language all the time. For example, today we know that one in four children in Spain is hungry or has a poor diet … If they had told us ten years ago, we would be committed to avoiding it. It is a communication that leads to resignation to alarming news.

And on a personal level?
I would say that we are increasingly separated from others. There is hardly any body language. You cannot argue by email or WhatsApp, nor should you, because it will be even worse. By WhatsApp we lose a lot of data: the gestures, the tone of voice of the other, their environment … It is a metaphor of what we live. Information escapes us all the time and in all fields. That is why it is increasingly difficult to get closer to the other. We are anxious for the other, but we cannot reach him.

If you are interested in the work of Enrique Baeza, you can discover it on his website.