My relationship with painting has always been one of experimentation and discovery. I say experimentation in that painting for me starts from and happens through a physical and affective relationship with the materials and pictorial elements. It is out of such embodied and articulate relation with them that images and themes arise. At the same time, painting is a discovery in that the paintings disclose to me unexpected meaning. They open as invitations into primordial dimensions of self, relations, and world

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The paintings recall significant past moments and experiences for me: certain moments of light, distinct feelings, and people. They often recall the past affective and embodied experiences of living through two military dictatorships. The images also speak to living in exile since the age of eight years old, to being a Latin American/Latino in the United States, and to having a border identity made up of various irreconcilable lineages. While the paintings refer me to a sense of loss, silence, and stark struggle, they also answer to a sense of light and joy that has sustained me through my life in the fecund beauty of the world and its powerful undercurrents.

The paintings in their material and formal force provide for me paths and renewing connections to the vitality of earth, others, animals, and to the time and space of the nonhuman. I find in many of the paintings a sense of cosmological time and of pre-reflexive being there with the human and the non-human.

The gestures and compositional movement of the images often refer to the way I feel my own identity and body holding together and falling apart in their happening. In this sense the paintings figure for me thresholds for transformation and rebirth, thresholds of identities arising and passing, and the opportunity of finding our relationality to others and the world around us.

I would say that for me, painting is about articulating the arising and passing of identities in their often fragmented and complex happenings. Each painting bares its own character and being, separate from me. Each is a distinct opening with its own depth, light, and particular story, not only in its revelatory force but also in how it was made.

I do not experience my works as mere objects but as part of an ongoing attempt to see, an ongoing attempt to understand and to find hope even in the darkest passages of life. I often have the impression that the paintings belong to anyone who comes to find meaning and hope through them. In that moment the works resonate, they come alive and belong with that shared happening in shared understanding.