Abroad Collages Amsterdam – San Juan 2004

For a long time I have worked with collages; the development of the collage came to me as a natural way of doing creative motions, a way of breaking apart the reality and putting it together in my own chaotic way.

To create my collages I need to collect material at random: bits of paper, stamps, tags, brief notes, and ultimately my own drawings. I have made it a point of documenting my experiences in a notebook in which I draw what I see, what I feel, the inner world, routes of emotion, and the people surrounding me. The drawings come from the experiences of daily life, the urge to be creative, the urge of doing, of being involved in the deep process of meditation.

The series Abloom-Abroad is a delayed reaction to the experiences in Amsterdam, in 2003. I was living in the Hotel Apolo in the Apololaan. Life was busy and I could not put the work together until many months later when Mariví and I went to the island of St. Barths. I include many of the street drawings I did in those days, as well as my concern for a healthy emotional life and the actual condition of the human thought. The brain, the center of my universe, takes action in a subconscious way to tell the story.

The 19 collages that compose the suite Abloom-Abroad, take the viewer to a journey into my inner world. Here I deal with the emotions of trust, love, war, happiness, beauty and God; the subjects that have concerned me during my creative life until now. A world I share.

Raimundo Figueroa