The work takes form through conceptual strategies to appropriate and reconfigure post-war era printed material drawn from archives, my collection of magazines and materials used in furniture and interior design. Collages, paintings and sculptures reshape modernist language, examining the complexities of power dynamics between South and North America from an era fixated on developmentalism and the dichotomy between developed vs underdeveloped societies. Visualizing how signs and symbols circulate through and across cultures, negotiated as they lose their original form and intention and undergo a process of translation.

In the collages, original vintage advertisement and lifestyle imagery from both continents are positioned to create counter-narratives. Employing a compositional approach that references the grid, the ground holds distinct and yet similar printed media, generating tension and difference in form and content, indicating modernism’s unobtained homogenization and standardization. The contrast between aims to affect a mutual presence and the neutralization of meaning overall, exposing the arbitrary nature of the signifier.  

The painting component of the practice floats an idea or theory where expression is mediated by printing machines and processes. Photo-realistic paintings and abstract works engage with the polarity between realism and abstraction - in both instances the act of painting inhabits a mechanical process, constricted by the tool or the idea. The photo-realistic paintings subjectively reconstitute published printed material by rendering images based on re-photographed pages of catalogs and periodicals. These works play with the thought of seeking to align image with sentiment through an empty pursuit of the right re-presentation, engaging in an inexpressive meditation about the elusive elucidation of identity, whereas the hours spent rendering is where the real subjective time lies.

Conversely the abstract paintings are made by simulation of printing processes by the artist’s hand, using brushes that emulate the head of a printer’s pass or the logic inversion of printing techniques such as using a silk-screen mesh to deposit oil paints. These works operate as visual resting fields among the collages and figurative paintings, reflecting on the translation process that occurs through the transference of knowledge, information and its limits.

The sculptures depart from minimalist forms that bear resemblance to modernist furniture and minimalist sculpture. They stand autonomously as artworks in the space, physically and sensorially altering it, besides establishing a dialogue with other works. Space is duplicated through mirror reflections, sound is absorbed through the use of absorbent materials, and the continuous space of the gallery is interrupted by forms that allude to furnishings or statuary of some sort. Occasionally, the pieces insinuate a possible destabilization or loss of equilibrium that could result in calamity: if the anthracite sitting on glass tips over, or the heater over the wax gets too hot. Actions, that, if materialized, cannot physically fulfill the predicament as presented since bronze and foam stand-in for the real object, as representations, humorously insinuating that stability has been reached through fortitude and irregularity.