The earthquake that struck Panama City last Friday left behind more than just the memory of a few seconds of uncertainty. It also awakened fears, ghosts, and questions about our very existence—an experience that invites us to reflect upon another abyss: the one an artist faces when standing before a blank canvas, deciding to embark on the demanding journey of self-representation.

Last Friday, the ground beneath Panama City reminded us of its living, restless nature. It was only a few seconds of shaking, yet enough to dismantle the fragile architecture of our everyday certainties. In that precise instant when the floor hesitates, time distorts: priorities are violently rearranged, and a sudden wave of buried questions rises to the surface. Who are we when our refuge begins to waver? Who would we have become if fate had drawn a different line?

A tremor does not merely shake walls; it disturbs the tectonic plates of the psyche. In the aftermath comes a dense silence, haunted by invisible ghosts and echoes that trail behind us for days. It is an experience of dispossession—a moment of being stripped bare before our own vulnerability.

Certain events force us to peer into an abyss that is not necessarily that of death, but of our own existence. For a few fleeting seconds, who we thought we were loses its footing, and amid fear and uncertainty, the specters of who we were, who we are, and who we might have been suddenly emerge.

That same chill—that mixture of paralysis and revelation—is what an artist can feel when confronting a blank canvas. Painting is not always a tranquil act of creation; often, it is a confrontation with the void. The virgin surface demands an honest response, and the self-portrait becomes the most radical form of that encounter. Before the canvas, the creator does not seek a flattering reflection, but rather to interrogate their own shadow. Much like the trembling of the earth, the act of truly looking at oneself shatters all pretense.

Throughout art history, the gaze inward has taken forms as varied as the fears that inhabit us: from the youth seeking solace in the physical medium to the devotional figure or the soul caught in a delirium of light; from mythological metamorphoses and theatrical masks to studios crowded with the ghosts and mannequins that keep watch beside the easel. In many of these pursuits, the self-portrait ceases to be an exercise in vanity and becomes a realm of exorcism, dissolution, and quiet resistance.

The days following a quake are a period of transition, a twilight zone where anxiety echoes in the ambient noise of daily life. Yet within that vulnerability lies a strange and sharp lucidity.

Both the inhabitant who listens to their home creak and the artist holding a brush before the white expanse share the same primal need: to name the fear, to look it in the eye, and to leave a mark testifying that, despite the aftershocks and the ghosts, we are still here.