Not Finished Yet
Vogue is out. My portraits are printed inside one of the biggest fashion magazines in the world. I say this sentence and it still feels distant, almost unreal. Not loud, not euphoric. Quiet. As if something important happened and my body hasn’t caught up with it yet.
I gave everything to these paintings. Weeks of focus, tension, discipline. Now comes that strange moment I’ve written about before, when the work exists but only halfway. If I don’t communicate it, if I don’t show it, it almost feels as if it never truly happened. Painting alone is not enough. The world doesn’t enter the studio by itself.
What surprises me is that this isn’t the end of anything. While the magazine reaches the streets, I’m still working with Vogue on something that, at least for me, feels even bigger. I don’t know yet if it truly is as big as my intuition tells me, or if I’m projecting my hunger onto it. What I know is that we are doing something that hasn’t been done before. We are turning the magazine itself into an artwork. And that idea keeps circling my thoughts. In a time where everything lives on screens, where images are consumed and forgotten in seconds, paper feels fragile. Magazines struggle. Books struggle. why anyone would buy something physical when everything is already on their phone.
And yet, this is exactly where I feel the loss. Something human is slipping away.
The time it takes to make something with care. The weight of an object that was touched, held, worked on. The presence of a human behind it. I wonder if we still value what is made by hand, or if we are slowly replacing meaning with speed. I wonder what future generations will understand about us. Will they know beauty as something built slowly, or only as something generated quickly.
I find myself watching my industry from the outside sometimes. Opening LinkedIn and seeing everyone suddenly become thinkers, writers, philosophers. So many words that sound human but feel strangely identical. I don’t reject technology. I’m using it myself. Writing is not my natural language and I’m learning how to express what I feel. But there is a line I don’t want to cross. I don’t want something else to create for me. I want help expressing what already exists inside.
I truly believe this project can make my work exist beyond social media. Give it weight. Give it memory. But belief alone doesn’t carry a project forward. Communication matters. Timing matters. And yes, how Vogue chooses to tell this story matters too.
The truth is that I’m exhausted. And a little lost. Painting was only the beginning. After that comes everything else. Planning. Filming. Editing. Writing. Updating the website. Learning marketing again and again. I came back from Christmas with my family thinking I would feel restored. I didn’t. My body rested, but my mind kept running.
It’s December 29th now. That time of the year when everyone becomes generous with dreams. When promises for the future feel easy to say, dreaming is not the hard part. Working for those dreams is. The question that keeps returning is simple and uncomfortable. Will I act, or will I wait.
I don’t know if I’ll write again before the year ends, so I want to leave this here clearly. In 2026 I want to return to the foundations. To drawing. To sketching. To learning how to see again with my own eyes. I want to build my international presence slowly. And I want to paint the biggest painting of my life.
Not to prove anything.
Only because I feel I’m not finished.
