Escaping Reality
Daniel G. Alfonso

How is it possible that just a week ago I came into contact with the work of Estephanie Jaime, better known as Salima Black?

I’m still thinking. My mind spins every time I see her paintings, drawings, and watercolors; I try to find an origin, a beginning. I feel that Salima’s work is a beginning and an end, and vice versa. Immersed in her universe and imagination, she externalizes a certain hegemony of the individual as the protagonist of all her compositions, and how they, her portraits, manage to transcend through subjectivity, passion, and suprapersonal instincts.

I try to look for connections. Do they exist? Yes. And here I remember Sartre’s thought when he stated that human beings are condemned to freedom and, when they are free in the world, they are responsible for all the activities they perform. She, as an artist, is familiar with existentialism.

It is reflected in every work, in every stroke, in every color, in every character she manages to represent in her format. Salima Black is trying to find herself, and her pieces are an escape route that allows her to find her essence. A linguistic and semantic essence that dialogues with a personal and intimate expressionism that, in turn, transits through a discourse close to Asian pop.

Her portraits, solitary and focusing on the human figure, reflect the anguished loneliness of individuals and, why not, of her own self. Likewise, her canvases constitute and reflect a certain quintessence that is poured into an experience that draws us toward an image that adopts a position very close to reality.

Salima Black represents the psychological genesis of the human being and the regulation between the real and imaginary experience of the subject in relation to itself.