In the increasingly saturated landscape of contemporary digital art, few artists manage to maintain an authentically personal voice while working within a shared visual grammar. Chema Mendez, a self-taught artist based in Spain, is one of them. His new collection, composed of five works, takes the form of a poetic and lucid investigation into three central aspects of the contemporary condition: technology, mortality, and emotion.

These are not merely themes, but narrative agents, forces in tension that move through his digital collages like archetypal presences in a dream.

Mendez’s work is rooted in a constant tension between past and present: his images draw freely from art history, with a preference for the plastic language and texture of classical painting, only to be torn from their original contexts and reinserted into a postmodern visual fabric where digital devices, hybrid bodies, and symbolic stratifications coexist.

This visual dialectic finds a precedent in the paradoxical precision of M.C. Escher, who, through impossible logical and spatial structures, destabilized our trust in perception. Similarly, Mendez constructs mental environments in which space and time collapse, generating an iconographic vertigo where flesh becomes painterly data, death a narrative structure, and technology both specter and mirror.

In *Between*, for example, the human face is torn open to reveal the cranial bone beneath, while the background dissolves into a sky of Flemish clouds. It is a liminal image, a point of contact between celestial serenity and the brutality of our finitude, reminiscent of the melancholic serenity of René Magritte.

As in the Belgian master’s surrealism, Mendez’s disturbing elements are never shouted, they are insinuated, made even more powerful by their quiet ambiguity.

Binge Scrolling, on the other hand, pushes the reflection toward a more ferocious horizon: a male body immersed in a smartphone is sliced by a red cut, a visceral symbol of constant, almost surgical, exposure to technological stimuli.

The figure becomes transparent, incandescent: the effect of cognitive saturation, emotional dependency on pixels and notifications. Technology here is not just a tool, but a protagonist, bearer of a slow, everyday death, at times, almost ritualistic.

The emotional and existential dimension is also central to *Trapped*, a work in which the human head becomes a mental cave, inside which a solitary figure sits, hunched over, barely illuminated by a shaft of light. The parallel with Platonic thought is inevitable: we are all prisoners of our shadows, our interpretations, our fears.

But in Mendez, this prison is not metaphysical, it is deeply bodily, psychological, contemporary.

It is perhaps in *Running Out of Time* that the influence of Miles Johnston, known for his dramatically human and distorted mental landscapes, is most evident. Here, Mendez multiplies the human body into a desperate collective race; the bodies become silhouettes, skeletal structures, constellations, and scorched outlines.

Time is no longer a chronological fact, but an emotional pressure that disintegrates, pushes, and devastates.

The image becomes a visual climax that turns into tangible anguish.

Finally, *Wake Up* closes the series with a visual and political jolt: an indistinct mass of kneeling men, identically dressed, submissive to a mute ideology. At the center, one figure stands out, pierced by a red beam, yet still upright, like a visual scream. Here, perhaps, Recife’s influence manifests, not so much in form, but in the ability to compose critical stratifications through powerful visual symbols, and in the search for a texture that always seems recovered from a memory, a dream, or a trauma.

In a historical moment where digital production often flattens into algorithmic aesthetics, Mendez offers us an alternative: an art that gets its hands dirty with the collective unconscious, that accepts contradiction and fragility, and reminds us that every fragment, even the most painful or incoherent, can be reassembled into a meaningful image. These five works do not seek answers, but openings: spaces for observation, attention, and humanity.