Having found some dolls next to the pictures of the objects that belonged to the victims of the holocaust caused me a strong impact. Maybe because I’ve always liked dolls myself. They were my childhood companions to whom I would make clothes, bundle, comb, as if they were people. It was by recognizing my children´s feelings about the dolls that I realized that if the dolls are in the museums or memorials of the holocaust, it means that they accompanied their owners after they were removed from their homes. Otherwise, they would have lost themselves by the utensils and objects of the houses. From this thought, some questions arose, which I tried to answer through this series of paintings: Who would be their owners? What would these girls look like? What would they have felt to get separate from their dolls?
It was to answer these questions that I began to paint them. I decided to give the supposed doll owners a face and an expression. I decided to use the shades of gray for the girls, in reference to their disappearance and keep the dolls colorful, in reference to life. As if to say that only they survived. The sepia tones or the bluish and greenish ashes carry the same meaning.

I researched pictures of girls waiting for the trains or walking hand in hand with adults, toward their ignored and fatal destination. Photos of the time, pictures of families, photos that told me they could be transformed into pictorial records of a disappeared generation.

It is estimated at one million six hundred thousand children who died in the Holocaust. They died, disappeared, were victims of medical experiments … they cried of cold, of hunger and of fear, without anyone being helped … they were uprooted from the comfort of their homes … they were separated from the security that their parents transmitted to them. They died and no one wept for them, no one complained about their bodies to give them the sacred burial that death demands. Relatives, neighbors and friends did not make Shiva … (the Jewish funerary ritual).

Children who were not given the right to have a future … children who could not live up to the expectations their parents had about them when they were born … children who were separated from their favorite toys, whose embrace comforted and protected … intelligences and talents that were not developed because they were aborted prematurely …

Meanwhile, in various countries of the world, in the various museums and memorials, the toys and dolls that belonged to these children remain, visible to the curious, indignant, indifferent or emotional glances of the visiting spectators …
But where is the identity, the name, the physiognomy of these children? The extensive lists often do not identify whether they are the names of children or adults … so we have to imagine their identity. We have to imagine the unimaginable.
And the Shoah is, was and always will be the unimaginable.

The aesthetic space of the unimaginable is unaware of history in its concrete singularities: the testimony of survivors, such as that of Primo Levi; The four photographic images taken at Birkenau, dangerously captured by an anonymous member of the SonderKommando; The registration in the Rolls of Auschwitz, buried by these same members shortly before the liquidation of the field; The photographs of the field laboratories … All these records are “moments of truth”, but they are not enough to imagine the identity of the children. And to be of the order of aesthetics they need another record, not the documentary.

All these “moments of truth” are of the order of the image. And the image has a double regime, which is inherent to any image, whether written, oral or visual: it is the fact of having a subjective nature and turned to inaccuracy. They have a fragmented and lacunar relationship with the truth that they are witnesses, although they are only what we have to know and/or imagine the life inside the fields.

This creates a difficulty because often, one asks for “too much” or asks “too little” for the image. When asked “too much”, that is, “the whole truth,” they will be insufficient to tell everything you want to know. They are fragments, inadequate, because they do not say everything. They are therefore “inaccurate.” When asked for “too little”, they will come to be seen as a “simulacrum”. False, therefore. If they can not be shown, it is as if it were proof that they did not really exist.
So, looking for a way, a strategy to imagine the unimaginable, in the aesthetic space, I thought that through painting I could rescue something of the soul, the feelings, the anonymity and the annihilation that these girls were submitted to. Through painting, give a face, a “visual identity” to these missing children.

Thus, these paintings, beyond the visible, become a record, become this “moments of truth” referred to above, although it is a “fictional truth”, a poetic license, to restore the image of these girls, restore their face, register their feelings … I researched images that could rescue from the past a moment of intimacy of the girls with their dolls. What resulted is presented here.

I note, however, that these paintings are mainly a prayer to the doll owners and their dreams destroyed.