— Issue #12
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Hello! Hope you enjoy this new issue talking about a new concept artwork and it's process :-)

We like to believe our wants are our own, that desire comes from some private and singular place inside us, untouched by anyone else. René Girard spent a career arguing the opposite. Desire is never original, it's borrowed. We don't want things, but we want what others want or seem to. The object is almost incidental. What matters is that someone else reached for it first.

1.- I started the sketch with random lines, automatism, on 13th January 2026. I could see some birds and flowers starting to form, so I went ahead and expanded it into a composition, unveiling the artwork as I went.
​ 2- It got more intentional as a composition and a story here. More work on the birds and the flowers, plants, the ecosystem around them. I tried to make one big bird to anchor the scene, but it became a rooster.

This is why desire spreads the way it does, not through scarcity, but by contagion. You don't need to lack something to want it. You just need to watch someone else want it. A glance, a gesture, a posture of longing is enough to plant the same longing in you. Two people rarely desire the same thing by coincidence. One is almost always teaching the other how to want.

A post that doesn't feel worth liking until someone else has liked it first. Fashion trends designed by influencers, adopted as if they were personal taste...

Did collectors really like what I created, or was it just a shiny object for a moment? It's not so common for a collector to reach out, to ask about the process or the backstory, or even to have a slightly more in-depth exchange. I respect the mystery, but after six years of selling my art digitally, it got me thinking.

1.- Alright, the sun is out. The ecosystem around the birds is a bit more in place now. I kept detailing the objects I could see from the first sketches. A crazy bird just popped up to the left of the rooster. I let it stay and gave it life with some eyes. It was originally supposed to be feathers, tbh.​
​ 2- Going ahead, I focused on the scene, the ground, and the sky. The sun is now harmonic, almost a perfect circle. I spent a lot of time on textures and brushwork here, trying to bring in some more depth, something I keep learning piece after piece.
​3- Starting to give color to the objects now, and studying a way to bring more depth to the floor and to the piece as a whole.

Two aggressive bidders will often buy far above estimate, not because the work suddenly became more valuable, but because each bidder's desire is amplified by watching the other refuse to fold. The rival is doing half the work of creating the price. Curious, no?
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Young collectors buying work by an emerging artist, not for the meaning or the art itself, but because a known collector or gallery bought it first. Denial instantly sharpens desire, especially once you learn who else is interested. A market can shift overnight after a major institutional show, even though nothing about the work itself has changed.

Just some thoughts: are my desires really unique, exclusively mine? Am I being played? Yes, likely, most of the time. Or designed, if you prefer how that sounds. But I won't judge whether that's good or bad, morally speaking.

In my recent artwork "Social Engineer", a scammer takes advantage of mimetic desire to mislead and scam people, using a profile picture he doesn't own, gathering lots of respectable-looking followers, and using that as a signal.

"Ether-Man" and "Ether-Man II" fit easily into this conversation too. How many stories have we heard, or watched play out, where an artist suddenly gains momentum and becomes desired by the crowd only after being collected by a notorious collector of the moment, or by a group, a museum, and so on, as I mentioned earlier.

There's power, and a construction of desire, when a collector believes in and publicly enjoys an artist's work. That's part of why not everyone can make a living selling art: at some point you're selling yourself, not just the work. Of course, selling and creating are two different areas, and I prefer to look at them separately most of the time.

1.- Kept working on patterns to bring a new level of detail, experimented with a lot of brushes and new textures on this one. I was already thinking about the concept by this point, reflecting on how watchful the "big bird" is toward the three birds, with the sun above both central figures.​
​ 2- Floor textures done. Gave more attention to the rooster's design and got really inspired by a recent work of mine, "Conatus". I love that I drew its representative figure inside the rooster; that detail means a lot to me. I also noticed a bird hiding in the random early drawings and made it intentional, a bird heading back home. I wasn't quite happy with the green ecosystem yet, still had to figure that part out.

Desire gets converted. Some of it turns into things: possessions, status, proof. That kind of desire is loud, visible, occupies the center of the room, borrows credit for value it didn't generate. And some desire never converts at all, it stays aimed at something too distant to ever really hold, and keeps moving toward it anyway, knowing it will never arrive. I believe that's the inner life of many artists around us.

Neither is more honest than the other. They're the same impulse, just caught at different distances from the thing it wants.

The uncomfortable part of the theory is that what we call "our" desire is actually a copy. We think we're choosing. We're mostly just mirroring the model which already stands between us and the thing itself, whether we notice it or not. Girard called it triangular desire for a reason: subject, model, object. Never a straight line.

Weirdly, this composition can also be read as a triangle: Birds, Sun, Rooster. Honestly, that wasn't intentional at the conceptual level, but that's how automatism works. Sometimes the meaning simply arrives, as long as you keep looking and absorbing.

We think we're reaching for the sun. We're really reaching for each other.