03 - Monstrosity | La Morada

"She is not afraid of the darkest dark, in fact she can see in the dark"

Sometimes, the most frightening thing about a monstrous gaze is not what we see in it, but what it makes us recognize in ourselves.

My exploration led me to Francisco de Goya and J'accuse, the film by Abel Gance.

Through Goya's studies, I examined the intensity of the human gaze and the way fear, suffering, and madness can distort the face. His figures seemed to emerge from a place where reason begins to collapse and something more primitive takes over.

The deeper I explored these images, the more I became interested in a different kind of death: the symbolic death of the self we have outgrown.

To become someone else, perhaps something within us must first come to an end. Old identities, beliefs, and ways of seeing ourselves must be confronted before they can be transformed. But this process is not necessarily beautiful or peaceful. It can mean facing the parts of ourselves we fear, the things we reject, and the darkness we would rather attribute to someone else.

From these studies, I began sketching a mermaid swimming through the depths, her face distorted by a monstrous gaze inspired by Goya's figures. The drawing eventually became a few seconds of animation.

I was interested in the moment when the human figure (in this case, the mermaid) and the monstrous become difficult to separate—not as opposites, but as two possibilities contained within the same being.

Perhaps facing our darkness is not about defeating the monster.

Perhaps it is about recognizing what it belongs to.

I began exploring monstrosity through the gaze: its intensity, its distortion, and the thin line between fear and hatred. I was interested in the moment when an inner darkness becomes visible, when something buried within us begins to take shape on the outside.Perhaps the monster is not something we encounter, but something we become when we refuse to look inward.

In J'accuse, I was drawn to the relationship between the living and the dead, as well as to the film's haunting imagery and its use of colour.

The dead are not simply absent; they return as a presence that the living cannot escape. Their return raises questions about violence, guilt, and the consequences of what human beings do to one another. These images led me back to the sea—not as a place of origin, but as a place of burial. A depth filled with bodies, memories, and creatures that have not entirely disappeared.

I imagined a skull transformed into a mermaid, and bodies reaching upward from the seabed, as if asking to be saved. The sea became a space where the monstrous and the vulnerable coexist, where what has been buried continues to seek the surface.

The monster becomes a mirror.

The gaze becomes a confrontation.

And the darkness, instead of being something to destroy, becomes something we must first learn to see.

Oil on canvas mounted on board, 2026

Oil Painting Process, 2026

Oil on canvas mounted on board, 2026

Blender Animation Process, 2026

Film Stills from J’accuse (1919)

Film Still from J’accuse (1919)

We often imagine transformation as an ascent toward something better. But perhaps, before we can rise, we must descend.We must look at what lives beneath the surface.