(EF)FACE – Hidden Features – Andrés Lejona

Born in 1962 in Miranda de Ebro, Spain, Andrés Lejona developed an early sensitivity to image-making and the staging of the human body. In 1987, he moved to Luxembourg, where an encounter with the Raluy Circus  deeply influenced his artistic path. From 1991 to 1992, he followed the troupe as a photographer across Europe and the French Antilles. In 1993, he moved to Colombia, returning to Europe in 2001. After a brief stay in Lisbon, he settled again in Luxembourg, where he currently lives and works. His work, situated between the surreal and the natural, draws on an imaginary shaped by movement, faces, and shifting identities, often inspired by his experience in the world of the circus. In his covered-face portraits, Andrés Lejona questions what is hidden as much as what is revealed. The figures, veiled, masked, or partially obscured, resist immediate interpretation. The viewer’s gaze is held back, redirected, and invited to imagine what is absent.

Identity becomes fragment, suggestion, silence. Through these constrained faces, the artist explores the tension between presence and erasure, intimacy and anonymity, interiority and exteriority. Whether in a series inspired by the Covid period, more playful and caustic, or in more poetic black-and-white works, his images reveal identity only indirectly. References to nature and culture, such as leaves or sheets of written paper placed over faces, evoke unusual living situations and social behaviours. The image captures a suspended moment, allowing a humanity that is both familiar and elusive to emerge.