It was November when I first came across Borondo and his faces made of vertical lines and splashes of color. A rainy Friday night when Lucael and I decided to escape to Turin to empty the bottles in the VIP area at Club To Club.

Somewhere between the underground scene and contemporary art installation, a cold cell in the former Turin prison, part of the international exhibition project The Others, housed his nervously painted glass plates. Dark, scratched, intense, and violent portraits.

I discovered that Borondo is a very young Spanish artist, born in 1989, known in Italy for his participation in the OUTDOOR 2012 street art festival and his solo show ISTEROFIMIA at the 999Contemporary gallery in Rome. His work spans both wall surfaces and glass plates, where he experiments with various techniques between drawing and painting.

In his works, clumsy and incomplete faces and bodies twist and spill over with cruelty, appearing scraped from a painted surface, like a peeling wall. Like Vhils, he removes in order to reveal. Abandoned shop windows, phone booths, backlit advertising spots, and decaying building walls allow fragmented, suffering figures to emerge from the urban grayness—figures almost camouflaged within the metropolitan decay, created in a style reminiscent of traditional engraving techniques.

Erasing to create, then. After all, we are all made up of different layers wrapped around each other: people, culture, history. Our social system is the product of this stratification. And perhaps, symbolically, by removing some of these layers, we might be able to reach something purer that had been hidden beneath. Something we have forgotten.