Artist Statement

Walking down a city block causes a visual digestion of imagery found on the sides of decaying buildings, light posts, and remnants of humanity itself. A landscape littered with graphic texts, flashing logos, and advertisements overwhelm the senses, causing me to dissociate from the present and focus on events from the past. Life was very consistent growing up in Miami; seasons came and went with very little change. The pattern of life I was subjected to became routine, so I relocated to New York City. The change of location made me focus more on my surroundings and myself; initiating an awareness of what attracts me and how I react to it. Art is a common thread that lines my thoughts with a sense of enlightenment through creation, self-expression, and collaboration. My current artwork is derived from urban landscapes, collage, duality, and language found in everyday life.

The romance with landscapes comes from my sensibility of isolation. My focus is to create a narrative with the presence of history and relevant symbols found in daily life. Brick walls, weathered scenery, ripped posters and the absence of nature are topics I’m interested in. I use enamels, acrylic paints, watercolors, tempera, cleaning chemicals, any medium that leaves a mark. Aluminum signs are the main support for my paintings. The use of these objects enriches my obsessive mark making allowing me to repeatedly scrape layers of paint with abrasions that won’t break the surface. By obstructing the surface text the viewer is lead to the idea of a language barrier. Being a product of two diverse cultures I’ve grown up with an appreciation for language. The dualities found in one language don’t convert easily to another; therefore I create a visual representation of what I sense when reading text.

Recalling personal memories and my own skeletons, I develop a visual world for stumps, enabling them to thrive and keep growing. Human characteristics such as language, clothing, and ingenuity infest the stumps identity. The use of one symbol to portray cultural and moral issues reiterates that humanity changes slowly, symbols create new meaning over time. A thought has a short lifespan but a symbol can’t die. Deterioration crawls under my skin and urges me to recreate this affect in a visual format, where ideas and emotions interact. I am a first generation American-Hispanic artist with roots in different continents. My mind thirsts for a constant deluge of information. Such knowledge can be seen in Cervantes’s hills, John’s Flags, and Bearden’s Jungles. A personal goal is to be acknowledged on the same wall as such individual. The wind brings change, I wish I had some.