In many of the works, silhouetted or backlit animals and figures become almost interchangeable, pitted against murky backdrops. The color palate is dark and muted, as though the pigments are steeped in the smoke-stained residue of age. In contrast, many of the images depict illumination by a quasi-bio-luminescent light source, and the greenish glow-in-the-dark tint suggests a voyeuristic surveillance as though the scene is being viewed through night vision goggles or infrared lenses. Throughout the series, the distinct sensation of loneliness and isolation is offset by an emphasis — through gesture, composition, and the artist’s profound ability to portray depth within his subjects — on beauty.

The work entitled History Painting also has obvious titular ties to historical precedent as well as visual ones. It has a strong reference to the American painter John Singer Sargent and his painting of Madame Pierre Gautreau, better known as Madame X. For Goicolea’s portrait, the young man shares the same strong profile, aquiline nose and incredibly pale complexion. These allusions play on traditional tropes of gender and beauty. The idea of beauty is further complicated by the fact that women of this period often used small doses of arsenic to achieve a pale alabaster complexion, which has obvious health implications and most likely led to the downfall of Madam Gautreau’s natural beauty in later years at the cost of what was deemed beautiful by society at the time.

DRAWINGS

The drawings and photographs share a layered approach to their craftsmanship. While the photographs are composited and altered digitally, the drawings are layered on sheets of semi-translucent mylar film rendered by hand in an analogue version of the digital process. Drawings like Forced and Fixated appear as simple line drawings on paper when in fact they are drawn from both sides of the paper to give the image a sense of foggy atmosphere and depth.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The photographs in the collection share the same sense of ambiguity and depict a variety of scenes that are at once beautiful and sublime as well as ominous and lonely. All of the photographs are digitally constructed in a way that mimics the layering process implemented in Goicolea’s paintings and works on mylar. The complex photo-editing process can be viewed in the video below.

SLEEP

In the photograph entitled Sleep we see four male figures lying in bed. Shot from above, we hover right over these resting figures and see them in their most vulnerable moment. The photograph is a heavily manipulated digital composite that was completed during the three months of mandatory quarantine for the Covid-19 pandemic.

The work was originally selected for Unlocked/Reconnected, an initiative by museums and galleries in the Netherlands to celebrate their reopening after three months of mandatory quarantine. Playing with the theme of being stuck at home, Goicolea shows four people lying in bed in an intimate and ambiguous scenario. they are not quite sleeping, and not quite awake. They straddle the line between sleep and death, voyeurism and exhibitionism, intimacy and fear.