Felipe Lozano began to explore the notion of pain within his artistic practice after the death of his father in 2016. During his mourning, he sat down with close friends to talk about the sadnesses that traversed their lives, and from the act of sharing those emotions emerged the idea of portraying them in intimate moments of vulnerability.

Greenish, almost cadaveric skin tones, lost gazes filled with hopelessness, and gestures seemingly condemned to abandonment were interpreted by Lozano in the series The Young Martyrs — exhibited in ArtBo’s Artecámara section in 2022 — a body of work he revisited the following year after the end of his relationship with his partner. On the day of their farewell, he photographed him with his cellphone, immortalized the image on canvas, and painted himself alongside him. This diptych, which opens the exhibition, was titled The Imperfect Lovers, evoking Perfect Lovers (1991) by Cuban conceptual artist Félix González-Torres (1957–1996).

His heartbreak led him to portray other couples who had also experienced the end of their relationships. Individually, he met with each of them and, in a kind of cathartic therapy, captured the precise instant when the desolation of the soul gives way to a tear. These realistic paintings, which allude to the pain of the present moment, are accompanied by blurred images that express the constant attempt to fade memories of the past and forget a love that is no longer reciprocated.