Jesús Hdez-Güero

PROTEUS SYNDROME
Series of photographic collages from archival images.
45 x 40 cm each
2015-2020

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Proteus Syndrome is a process-based investigation initiated in 2015 on how prominent figures from contemporary history and the present converge, almost mimetically, in their postures and expressions before the camera, transcending eras and ideologies. These personalities have set themselves up as icons within the collective imaginary; my purpose is to subject these images to a critical gaze that questions the construction of power and its representation through iconographic deconstruction.

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The artwork employs collage as a post-photographic resource. The technical singularity of my methodology relies strictly on folding, eschewing any traditional cutting. I approach the fold derived from traditional origami as a conceptual operation: a mechanism that, while perversely preserving the physical integrity of the original support, visually mutilates and dissects it, leaving the image contained and latent beneath the new face. By leaving the fold of the modified paper unglued, the plait releases itself from the background, generating an organic, detached three-dimensionality whose irregular torsion projects geometric shapes against the white void of the latent support. To visually demonstrate this three-dimensional, purely object-based condition, the artworks are displayed in box frames to expose the physical looseness and vulnerability of the fold. This formal resource directly addresses the psychological and institutional splitting (desdoblamiento) of public figures; I question the fracture between the political leader who is perceived or idolized under a specific official narrative and the actual figure that transmutes, deforms, or ultimately reveals its true nature over the course of their life.

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La series operates within a tight scientific and mythological correspondence. It references the genetic pathology that gives it its title—characterized by the progressive and asymmetric deformation of the organism—which was named in direct honor of the Greek god Proteus, a marine deity who mutated and assumed multiple elusive forms to evade capture. Through this parallel where the organic illness derives from mythical mutation, I displace the photographic portrait into the territory of political anomaly, laying bare the deformation and capacity for camouflage that underlies the construction of official identity.

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Videos of the artist's books: