I began by drawing the symbol of Algol onto the blank canvas. Not so much to build the painting around those boundaries, but rather as a way of invoking its energy. I began painting as a form of meditation on the symbol, allowing impulses and desires to imprint themselves onto the canvas without much preconceived intention. Methodologically, I worked in short periods of time, deliberately interrupting the process and setting the piece aside for a while, only to return to it later from a different perspective, so that the final result would become an accumulation of complex and somewhat contradictory pictorial layers.

At some point, I realized that the painting’s overall atmosphere conveyed depth, darkness, and an unfathomable mystery, qualities associated with Algol. I decided to focus on intensifying that disturbing sensation. Up to that moment, the painting could have been framed within the realm of the nonfigurative, which for me evoked a magmatic dimension of Algol as a transformative and disruptive pulse emerging from deep within the entrails. However, it seemed important to include in the painting the human reaction to that force: a controlling impulse.

That is how the crown of fingers appeared, an image that had been haunting me throughout those months, as a symbol evoking power, the pointing finger, and the weight generated when desire or impulse is restrained. The contrast between the nonfigurative and the figurative can be understood as what defines the Algolian threshold: between absolute surrender and absolute control lies an arc of heterogeneous experiences that cannot be represented.

In some way, not only did multiple layers of the symbol of Algol emerge throughout the process, but the process itself became Algolian, akin to a purge.