| From the beginning my work has been a reflection on gaze. How do we construct, in our experience, those eyes that look at us fixedly? How do we interpret and elaborate in our psyche the shadows, the highlights, and all the implicit landscape of each photograph? If our way of seeing evolves from social and cultural viewpoints, can we conclude that all gaze is inherently political and that all artistic production is subject to judgment? The gaze, the stare, has power. Art is evidence of this; it questions our way of seeing, interrogates the history that has produced all the variants of gaze, and thus constitutes a multiplicity of visual reactions to the world. | 
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Luis Gonzalez Palma
Luis Gonzalez Palma, Annunciation, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.From the beginning my work has been a reflection on gaze. How do we construct, in our experience, those eyes that look at us fixedly? How do we interpret and elaborate in our psyche the shadows, the highlights, and all the implicit landscape of each photograph? If our way of seeing evolves from social and cultural viewpoints, can we conclude that all gaze is inherently political and that all artistic production is subject to judgment? The gaze, the stare, has power. Art is evidence of this; it questions our way of seeing, interrogates the history that has produced all the variants of gaze, and thus constitutes a multiplicity of visual reactions to the world. In my artistic process I create images that invite you to examine them through what I call “emotional contemplation,” giving through their beauty a sense of form. Through the years I have constructed sceneries and modified certain visages to create images that allow other internal perceptions, understandings, and viewpoints of the world.
In the beginning, I worked with metaphors through frontal portraits with a fixed and direct stare that revealed both the dignity and fragility of the subjects; for me, the face is a pretext for the human condition. In my early work with portraits you could perceive the loneliness and, at the same time, the emotional strength of the people. Here the stare was a contradictory and ambiguous space. In my portraits, particularly of my Guatemalan subjects, the face functioned like a mirror in which I found myself reflected. I questioned myself searching for sense. In the portraits the strength of the stare lies in the power that it has to attract my own gaze. The work has achieved maximum power if a viewer invests in the portrait as he does in himself. I desire for the viewer to discover life, energy, and presence in the silent stare of the portrait, and if he feels so taken as to be not only the observer but the observed, then the face, the visage, the work has succeeded. It has achieved an existence that renders the viewer conscious of the fact that we all share a common destiny.
At the present time, with great changes in my personal life and emotional and geographic situations, I am working on a different representation, but always starting with my constant obsessions: beauty as a political power, religious experience charged with love, and pain as explanation of the articulation of the world and man. Emptiness exists in the interpersonal relations of a society that has fallen, and healthy ties are scarce given the complexity of emotions. The new work, entitled Hierarchies of Intimacy (2004-2005), was executed in Argentina. In it I have tried to represent scenes charged with significant psychological experiences by using titles to “investigate,” to infuse a dialogue that becomes like the silent script in a film, each image a scene seemingly disconnected. Alone each photo acts as an instant in a prolonged dream in which figures outside time are like wounds in memory, but as a whole Hierarchies of Intimacy becomes an essay of images charged with mystery and tension.
In each of the images the visible body and the object are vehicles to enter into a secret but brilliant world, presented openly though encapsulated, denied to the caress but offered to the stare. This process parallels religious iconography, its function, and its omnipresent intangibility. The mise-en-scene presents the time of the unconsciousness with its free association, its yearnings, and its fears; the human’s acts have been intertwined inside an unreal world. Through the captivating gaze of the subject held within the sacred, brilliant gold leaf, the idea of death re-enters the work.
My most recent works were conceived with the desire that the image contain, and somehow stress and express, the visible word and fundamental experience that sustains visual adventures—like apparitions unseen when you look; words unsaid when you speak, and silences contained in the symphony. This work is personal and intended to give a body to the ghosts that govern personal relationships and religious hierarchies, and to address directly those that govern the politics of life.
