Flat Love: The Painting (I).

Girl with Ball. 1961. Work of Mr. Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997).  

Lichtenstein was inspired by an advertisement of a lodge for honeymooners, in the Pocono Mountains. The black and white ad, like the painting, shows the stereotypical 50's American girl (the pin up), with wavy shiny long hair, open mouth with full lipstick, a healthy and curvaceous body and a direct, "I'm having a good time" attitude. The advertisement people were selling the same thing they are selling now: sex.

So Lichtenstein takes the stereotype and pushes it beyond itself, creating a pop idol of an American pin-up. The girl from the advertisement is transformed from a photorealistic dull pin up into a comic book effigy of XX century American femininity.

Flat Love: Girl with Ball.

Roy Lichtenstein's painting changed my project considerably.  It focused the theme, the characters, it gave me a visual style, but most importantly, it provided me with a soul. So now, if I go to the MOMA, no matter what, I have to pay a visit to ‘Les Demoiselles’ and to ‘Girl with Ball’.  On the other hand, you don’t really need to enter the MOMA to see her nowadays. She’s out there, all over 53rd Street. You can’t miss her...

Flat Love: The Girl at the MOMA.

I developed this idea (a man and a woman are in love but they live in two separate spatial dimensions) for a few weeks until I had a magical encounter with a girl at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). It changed everything.

I had met her before (after all, she is quite a celebrity) but I had never really noticed her. But one afternoon, I went to the MOMA to see the giant retrospective of the great Lee Friedlander, which was an overwhelming, mind blowing and exhausting experience (more than 500 photographs). Although I was pretty tired, since I was at the museum, I had to pay my obligatory visit to the ladies: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. I could stay in front of them for hours on end...

Then I wandered around the galleries and I saw her: a brunette with huge eyes and full red lips, wearing a dark blue bathing suit and holding a read & white beach ball. 

In some unexplainable way, I felt as if she was the one who chose me and not the other way around. 

Yes, you may think I'm crazy but she was looking at me...

Flat Love: The Early Script.

I draw more than a I write. Many of my ideas begin with improvised sketches. Sometimes an image comes out of my mind and finds its place in the story many months later.

In the case of FLAT LOVE, I started with a storyboard that resembled an experimental silent film.

Two lovers, a man and a woman, are always looking at each other but they're never in the same place; they never share the same space. While the man stays in a third dimensional world, he looks at a woman who is watching him from a two dimensional world. They both know they're watching each other and that they're in love but they never make contact. It is an impossible love. Later, we see that the man becomes a picture and then it is the woman who is looking at him in a third dimensional space. Ultimately, the story ends with the audience looking at both man and woman on a flat, two-dimensional screen (that is the movie or TV screen). Perhaps, we are also players moving on a flat surface unaware of being watched by somebody else, outside…  

Flat Love: The Sponsor

I met Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg, co-founders of FLUX FACTORY, at their original location in Williamsburg, right before they moved to Long Island City in Queens. Since then, FLUX has grown into one of the most interesting and active art groups in NYC, always supporting original, stimulating and humorous projects as building a replica of an imaginary New York, transforming stranger's homes into sites for interactive works and walking tours of fake street art. 

Photo: The "Tower of Babel" by artist Joel Braden Stoehr at the Flux Factory in Long Island City. Photo via joaoflux's flickr

In 2008 they were forced out of their home/gallery to make way for a Commuter Tunnel. They are currently operating from her website before they find a new home. www.fluxfactory.org

Flat Love: The Idea.

It all began with an application to the New York State Council of the Arts for a film production grant. My sponsors were again the guys at FLUX FACTORY, who had supported my previous short Bedford. I applied to NYSCA (http://www.nysca.org/) with a project titled Spiritu, about a mischievous atheist ghost who refuses to accept his death.

Six months later, I received a letter announcing that I was awarded with the total amount of my request: $15,000. It was the largest sum I'd ever gotten for a project so I couldn't be happier. However, by the time the NYSCA grant arrived, my initial enthusiasm in Spiritu had started to melt. The screenplay wasn't finished; I was having a hard time finding an ending to the story. In short, I was stuck.

One night, while I was surfing the internet and avoiding my writing duties, I found a website announcing a multidisciplinary art contest on Don Quijote, the universal masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes. All kind of artists were invited to create a new piece (literature, music, dance, painting, film, you name it) based on any of the themes of the book: reality vs. fantasy, adventurous life, utopia, the ideal of justice, madness, etc. But the theme that hit me unexpectedly was platonic love: Does perfect love only exist in our imagination? Rapidly I wrote on a piece of paper: "He was in love but she was flat". 

The idea was: two people are in love but one lives in a three dimensional world and the other is two-dimensional. Unfortunately I couldn't apply for the "Don Quijote" contest because the deadline was due in only a few days. But no matter, it gave me a perfect excuse for a fresh start (with a muse called Dulcinea).