Luces y Sombras
Graphite and Ink on paper (studio sketch)
Executed 29th May 2024, Portugal
Luces y Sombras was a bright moment in my practice, a drawing that consolidated a chain of earlier bocetos and crystallised the graphic language that now defines much of my work. I had been observing, sketching, refining, searching for a way to speak visually about the quiet disconnection I saw everywhere. One afternoon in London, I noticed two teenagers walking home from school. Their postures mirrored a rhythm I had come to recognise: heads bowed, shoulders rounded, thumbs in constant motion. They walked side by side, yet their attention separated them completely. That fleeting observation became the seed for this work.
I approached the drawing with deliberate simplicity: blocks of ink, clean negative space, and the precise balance between what I reveal and what I withhold. The figures emerge from sharp contrasts, “lights and shadows” both in the technical and metaphorical sense. The illuminated passages, like the glint on a cheek or the white edge of a sneaker, coexist with fields of black that seem to absorb them. The play of contrast is not only formal; it describes the very condition I wanted to capture, the duality of adolescence under the light of the screen. Technology promises illumination, but in its glow, I often see a shadow: of anxiety, distraction and loss of presence.
The choice to title it in Spanish, Luces y Sombras, felt instinctive. In my native language, the phrase carries a lyrical, almost moral weight. It evokes balance, but also opposition. For me, it speaks to the tension between the world’s visible brilliance and the invisible consequences beneath it, the allure of connection and the quiet erosion of awareness that follows.
Compositionally, the two teenagers act like a duet in counterpoint. One stands more compact, the other takes a longer stride. Each gesture, each fold in their clothes, finds its echo in the other. Their backpacks root them to everyday reality, the return from school, the ordinary walk home, even as their eyes disappear into the artificial light of their screens. The space around them is deliberately void. There is no street, no context, no horizon. By erasing the world, I wanted to make their disconnection visible, to show that the blankness they inhabit is not the paper, but the condition itself.
This piece also represents a technical resolution for me. It draws together everything I had been learning through previous works like Screen Walk and my stencil studies: the confidence of thick, black lines; the economy of shadow; the balance between stillness and weight. The clarity of the line here is something I had been chasing for years, it’s the moment when the visual language stopped searching and started speaking.
But Luces y Sombras is also deeply personal. As a former teacher, I have seen first-hand how quickly the language of play and curiosity is replaced by the gestures of scrolling and swiping. I’ve watched students drift into distraction; their sense of presence slowly rewritten by the algorithms that shape their attention. I didn’t want to dramatise that reality; I wanted to show it as it is, quiet, ordinary and devastatingly normal. The stillness of the scene carries its own accusation.
The title, then, is not just descriptive. The “light” is the glow of the device, seductive, immediate; while the “shadow” is what that light leaves behind: the erosion of imagination, empathy and mental space. In this work, I tried to turn that contradiction into form, to let the drawing itself embody the paradox of our time.
Looking back, I see Luces y Sombras as the moment my visual vocabulary reached maturity. It bridges the intimacy of my practice with the urgency of the street. Every line here was drawn with the awareness that it could later become a stencil, enlarged and brought to a wall where people could encounter it in real time. In that sense, this piece became a hinge between observation and intervention, between reflection and action.
More than a preparatory sketch, Luces y Sombras feels to me like a moral image for our time. Its light and shadow are not only visual, they are psychological, emotional, and cultural. They belong to the atmosphere in which this generation is growing up: one illuminated by screens, but shadowed by their cost, adolescence under the rule of the algorithm.