I am always surprised at the almost inexperienced naivety with which I processed and worked on various topics of the German past as a teenager. Sometimes I wonder if this was due to my Mexican roots, which made it difficult for me to relate personally and directly. As an adopted child, who came to Germany at the age of seven, I found the first experiences in Germany extremely disturbing, almost grotesque in their human distance and stiffness.

Despite an intensified history course and a Jewish best friend in high school, the German history of the Second World War, the scope of the Holocaust and the concentration camps came to me much later and on extremely strange detours into my deep consciousness and into a real personal confrontation.

The film adaptation of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” by Peter Jackson drew my attention to the aesthetics of the mass marches by the Nazis. The fascination and power, albeit a threatening one, that emanated from these presentations, impressed also me and started an intensive thematic occupation also in my painting. Typically, however, my approach to a question is always a personal one. What and how strong is the evil in myself? What is the proportional relationship between the power of evil and its destructiveness? How much of this can a society tolerate and allow to be granted? Is there any way to profit from the power of evil and bypass its destructiveness?

I discovered that the character of the Uruk Hai Lurtz, as shown by Peter Jackson, captivated me with his immediate physical vitality and unshakable fearlessness. I found his terrifying arrogance towards pain and death enviable. Not without wistfulness (and a certain sense of humor), however, I have been able to understand that such a destructive force in its malice always runs the risk of being beheaded in the final analysis.

In this context, further works of the “Appearances” have emerged with a certain wink, which show Lurtz in various alienations and personifications.

1. Uruk 1, 155 x 200 cm, mixed media on canvas

2. Uruk 2, 100 x 120 cm , mixed media on canvas

3. Uruk 3, 100 x 120 cm, mixed media on canvas

4. Uruk 4, 100 x 120 cm, mixed media on canvas