Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture is an Art Bridges Local Access exhibition featuring works from LACMA’s collection now on view at its final venue, the Vincent Price Art Museum, through August 30.
I was recently able to spend some time with Fabián Cereijido—whose work Viaje en Leche (Voyage in Milk) (2012) is featured in the exhibition—and his friend and collaborator, master printer Francesco Siqueiros of El Nopal Press in Downtown Los Angeles. Every Friday, Cereijido and Siqueiros meet at the El Nopal studio, gather their materials, and walk over to a local café where they grab a coffee, sit outdoors, and draw a portrait of each other, a ritual that has become a weekly routine. Below is a condensed version of the conversations we had that day and some of the portraits the two created.
Claudine Dixon: When did you start this exercise of creating these drawings together?
Fabián Cereijido: Two or three years ago—2023 appears to be the earliest inscribed drawings here.
In 2011 I started doing self portraits, whenever the fancy took hold. However, since 2014, I’ve been doing a self portrait every single day. Usually the first thing each morning, as I view myself in the mirror.
Francesco Siqueiros: I’ve been wanting to get back into painting now. My last self-portrait could have been made in 2015, when I was doing more drawing and printing. Although I never really stopped painting, I thought that portraiture was a good idea to get involved in through the medium again, using a painting technique.
CD: At these weekly sessions, you both create only one drawing each time. Francesco provides the paper. You each select your preferred media, which is…
FS: Charcoal, sometimes graphite, sometimes I also use chocolate or coffee.
FC: I bring all my graphite pencils, ranging from hard to soft, as well as metal instruments to inscribe the surface of the paper.
FS: There is an unconsciousness always hovering in the process. I think that in something like the way I approach it, it has a lot of different facets. One of them is that in the process of conversations sometimes there are epiphanies. It may or may not be connected to the portraiture, but it adds to the excitement to the particular moment. This thing of transference, for example, I always think there is a kind of hovering epiphany that is going to show up in working with the portraits. A kind of feeling that there is a shredding of something into its parts and illuminating something, it’s not happening in slow motion. I do have a little anecdote. Once I called Fabián, to let him know that I had to cancel our session, I had something else that I had to do at the appointed time. But Fabián said, okay, but the portrait is very important! We have to do it, even if we move our meeting to another date, another time. A cancellation is not allowed.
Our conversation often segues into the spontaneous. For example, let’s take the topic of Cubism. I’m pulling this one in because it enriches and modifies the center of the subject that we are discussing. For example, I’m talking and I’m already finding the argument against what I’m talking about so I switch over to do an amendment to what I started talking about. I go back and forth to get a picture with a lot of different sides.
FC: Sometimes that can be dizzying. I don’t have any argument with what you say, but then you turn things around. It’s the dialectic. We often enter into an area of noticing the side of being able to cope with a sudden degree of discomfort, something that’s a bit oblique.
FS: I took a seminar a long time ago in the Department of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, they brought in Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher. Basically I remember that he was always talking about the negative. Everything you are perceiving, you are really thinking about its opposite.
FC: In a way, that’s how you learn how to draw. How things will look if you remove the thing you are looking at.
I love Rembrandt, he did so many self-portraits, not only paintings…
FS: “SRETP…GSTUS.” I’m into Synesthesia.
FC: Which means, the sonic equivalent to something else.
CD: There’s something very Renaissance-like in these paintings.
FS: Fabián said there is movement here.
FC: All self portraiture shows “the thing becoming itself” as it adopts the position.
FC: Oh, this one, I thought it was you. It was me by you, and it ended up being you by me. Maybe we’re melding into one another. What if now that I’m going to be having a grandson, he comes out looking like you, Francesco? Surprise!
FS: Well, you never know… This one, I look like a combination of your grandmother and Jean-Paul Sartre.
FC: Being and Nothingness.
FC: I like how all of these drawings together look like a big group of different people. It’s not just us! This has been great, you have helped us find a new perspective about ourselves.
FS: This is one of the first ones, dating from 2023. This is a good one. You know, these look better now than when we first made them.
FC: You tend to make me look younger.
CD: You mentioned something that I want to close with, how this exercise has cemented your friendship.
FC: No matter how it comes out, I trust Francesco’s description of me.
FS: At some point I might have thought, I do find the drawings look so much more interesting than when I first saw them. I think Fabián’s portraits of me uncover something deeper than my portraits of him.
FC: In your drawings of me, you visit the stereotype.
FS: Yes! You don’t do that.
FC: In my drawings of you, your image doesn't even appear until the spaghetti starts to dissolve into the face.
Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture is on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum through August 30, 2025. On Saturday, July 26, at 3:30 pm, you can join a panel discussion at VPAM between featured artists Jennifer Moon and Minna Philips and exhibition curators Claudine Dixon and Eve Schillo.