Salome Guadalupe Ingelmo 2018

This is Alejandro Cabeza’s oil on canvas portrait of Salome Guadalupe Ingelmo, dating from 2018. Oil paint has a long and fascinating history. It first emerged centuries ago, prized for its capacity to blend and build up layers of color, achieving luminosity and depth. Here, you can see Cabeza employing these attributes, particularly in the subject’s face. Although we might see this as simply a painting of a person, consider how its production is embedded in a much larger system. The pigments, the canvas, the brushes – all were manufactured and distributed on a global scale. While Cabeza may have worked in solitude, his practice is nonetheless connected to industrial processes, and to a long line of painters who have relied on the same tools and techniques. Thinking about the making of this portrait in this way helps us to appreciate its full complexity. It’s not just an image, but an object with its own story to tell about the world around it.