Artist Statement:
I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist.
With my artworks I intend to capture a sense of energetic beauty in a non-traditional way while revealing the complexity of the human psyche as a social individual and its environment. Through different types of media – photography, digital video, mixed media and installation art -, I explore the ever-changing state, conceptual ideas, and sociopolitical perspectives of today’s society.
Since the beginning of my artistic career I’ve experimented with a variety of techniques ranging from drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography to 16 mm film format, digital video, and multimedia. For the past fifteen years I’ve been interconnecting these disciplines in photography series such as Flores Negras, Ceci N’est Pas un Pistolet and Cultura Pop series, as well as in installation art pieces and videos such as Media Negras, 20:200, Volver, Fortress Europe: The Human Cost, and Progress, among others.
Much of my artwork exposes the subtle references of words when juxtaposed with images in motion. Because of my recurrent use of text, I was invited to be a Guest Artist at the Art Talk Language is a Virus at the McNay Art Museum in 2014. Six months later, McNay curator Rene P. Barilleaux invited me to have a Solo Exhibition at the Octagon Gallery with my one-channel video I, Me, Light that highlights forty San Antonio individuals with the one-word that defines who they are.
My intention as an artist is to bring out the friction and subtle balance between beauty and discomfort. Beauty because I’m constantly looking for the perfect composition and aesthetics, and discomfort because I’m affected by the lack of justice. My art is my way of detecting beauty and experimenting with it, but it is also my therapy and my way of refusing to accept those injustices as unavoidable and necessary.
About the Lukutuwe Series:
This series of screenprints focuses on the symbolism of ancient icons created by the Mapuches, an indigenous civilization located in South America.
These prints are inspired by the shapes, colors and aesthetics of the Mapuche’s textiles. My pieces explore the shapes and patterns of the textiles made by the mapuches, especially the fajas (belts) that were made by the women. These designs combined endless combinations of geometrical figures as well as symbolic iconography. The mapuche cosmovision included a tetradic principle where most elements were related with the number 4 for the four cardinal points and the four seasons of the year.
A fundamental avatar is the image of Lukutuwe, which has been re-interpreted by several studies and scholars. Some consider Lukutuwe to be a man or a woman kneeling and praying, others the divine master, and new interpretations see it as part of a sacred and femenine aspect of life as well as a representation of the life cycles or different aspects of female sexuality.
For this project my intention is to reconnect and remix the Mapuche’s cosmovision with a contemporary look at the human connection with space and the universe.
