The rawness of the faces he portrays is the result of observed visages, gut-level perceptions felt in the moment—states of mind and emotions metabolized and then brought to the surface, altering the very structure of the skin, of the body itself. It is an alchemy between the rot we carry within and the darkest, saddest emotional states that take over.
Centina has the ability to contain all of this within a single image—a confrontation that, in some ways, provokes discomfort. Man and his ugliness, his fears, emerge and take possession of his own body. No masks to shield him. What surfaces is the darkness, the unconscious, and above all, the truth.
His work is a violent, grotesque, bizarre response to the society of unrestrained consumerism, to unchecked urban sprawl, to the endless succession of construction projects that have filled our beautiful country with abandoned concrete giants—stripped of their function, skeletons of a false socio-economic prosperity. Decaying carcasses made of moss, stone, iron, rust, shattered glass, rubble, charred wood, and broken walls—forgotten by everyone.