Born in Singapore, and raised in Houston, TX, I’m a Colombian-American creating paintings that render chaotic dreamscapes filled with figures either seeking quietude, or actively revolting against it. I received my BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and then my MFA soon after from the New York Academy of art. During undergrad I spent an influential year in Japan studying printmaking and the Japanese language, and later upon finishing my MFA I spent another year attending artist residencies in Spain, Germany, Russia, and here in the United States. Afterwards, I moved to Brooklyn to work as an assistant for Sean Kenny, an artist who creates immersive sculptures out of LEGO bricks. A few years working there had me traveling internationally for various exhibition installs and de-installs, but eventually I left to begin in earnest as an independent artist - creating my own work, commissioned work, and occasionally working as an artist assistant to a few NYC based artists. In 2023 I moved to Seattle to live closer to family.
My artwork explores the intervention of the digital world in our day-to-day lives. The mass of knowledge at our fingertips, the reliance on the internet for community and business, creates at times a kind of solitude and an altered relationship with other people and the natural world, one which is generally extractive. My oil paintings are meant to evoke a feeling of being in the thrall of the aesthetic beauty of things and in the escapism that is always available, rendered in a monochrome or nearly monochrome color theme that serves to unite the many disparate elements of the composition as well as forefront their symbolism.
My interest in creating these images has largely come from a desire to visualize, in as visceral a metaphor as I can, the emotionally conflicting experience of navigating the incredible visual chaos of the modern digital world - a world full of a dizzying range of styles that can encompass eye-catching advertisements, seamless and seductive graphic design or UI, purposefully haphazard imagery cleverly put together in memes, and even AI created amalgamations that can capably mimic reality. The whirlwind of commentary and contradicting opinions cast by the internet onto this circus of visual media and propaganda creates in my view a kind of schizophrenic headspace consisting of ceaseless friction. Visualizing this headspace in a grounded style, fused with the historicity of figurative realism and physicality of oil painting in particular, provides catharsis and invites philosophical questions about the constant tumult, physical and emotional, throughout human history. My work aims to reach those who also feel inundated in the modern discourse of social media, politics, and pop culture, and want to step back to try to frame and digest the discourse in a more stable form.