ecently, I read something like: “Paint as if you were poor, and if you are poor just paint the figurative.” I do hate painting, but this is the kind of catchy, hard-to-decipher, semi-silly, semi-cynical statement that stays with me when making art (or attempting to with nihilist joy). At the end of the day, I am poor and I make figurative art. It feels good to know that’s what I am and what I do.
I like my (thought) processes simple so I can actually carry them out. Thinking before acting is becoming harder as the years go by, so when an image or idea comes to mind I always go by first-thought-best-thought and start making by instinct. I also do it this way because I find the ideological very dishonest. Truth lies in desire and impulses more than in anything else.
In the past couple of years, I forced myself to focus on a single medium because I grew limited by my lack of commitment to one. Despite the fact that video had been my instant joy-provider for years, I couldn’t stick to it; Youtube had been killing the video-art star in me for a few years by then. So, I stuck to objects and the love for manual labour.
And then my art ran wilder than ever because, as a sculptor, I behave like the only child I am: one who builds a dummy to play with and who sets the playground to do so. This primal approach hopefully produces art that is blunt and honest about the reason it exists in the first place, its material conditions of existence, and the decadent and antiquated context in which it is condemned to have any life.
I like my art unashamed of being literal, or self-explanatory, even childish if you may. The privilege of art education is, as any other privilege, one to check and dismantle constantly.
So, in these pictures you see mainly hardened t-shirts. I choose them because they only cover torsos: they lack head, genitals, or legs. It is that lack which allows them to form a unity. They are also hollow and light as fuck, like a tube. And deeply unstable: the starch and the structures I used to shape them are poor materials used in a precarious manner that may not hold forever. Colourful, hollow, light as fuck, unstable. Tee, tube.
There’s another realm of figuration in my work that functions more like a metonymy.  I use graspable objects to speak to the body by its main negative space, alluding to its functions, and how we relate, and care for it. It is more about what we share than what we don’t. The piece titled, “Valle Verde,” came out as a landscape but I was trying to allude to some kind social mass. So, I got on with the idea of the social as a solid representation of nature: soil as a membrane and symbols as trespassers. Suspension as the ultimate operation holding all of it.
Yeah, overall I would say I speak to the absurdity in the idea of self. You’re not a separate entity whatsoever, and that’s what’s so great.