Recent Works

The direction of this current body of work is an exploration into what poet Audre Lorde calls “A bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” Their creation is an affirmation of a reconstructed form of being in the world. The images that we see in the final stage of the painting emerge only as a result of first being in unstable contexts. The process for creating the works begins haphazardly, and that arbitrary, unpremeditated starting point creates the conditions for the unfolding of subsequent compositions.

These paintings carry history, memory and loss. They are a testimony of the need for meaningful action in the service of emphatic expression, moving beyond restraint or silence. They embrace complexity, imperfection, non-linearity and incoherence. They enfold thick, compounded narratives, instead of thin, plain ones.

The use of layering and alternating paces between fast and slow as I paint; the use of highly pigmented, vibrant, high viscosity, heavy paint and the rendering of colorful, puzzle-like compositions are all intentional choices to arrive at these works.

Through them I explore themes related to displacement and identity. As an exile and having moved several times in my lifetime, I have experienced first-hand the recomposing of one’s identity as one moves through the world. How does one retain the initial formative memories in the face of the passage of time and loss? How does one shed parts of oneself to gain new parts, and honor that? How do we integrate both the pain of a lingering sense of palpable and ambiguous loss, as well as the joy of the new stories that emerge and reconfigure in ourselves within changing circumstances? These are some of questions I am processing through this work.

My work and paintings aim to delve deeper into these questions. I belong to a generation of Venezuelan migrants who have had to leave our country by necessity and by force. This diaspora began in the late 1990’s and has only steadily increased since then. At the same time, Latin America, in general, and Venezuela in particular, had already had a long history of fusion and hybridization brought on by decades of European migration, not only from early colonizers, but also during the European migrations of the 20th Century. Unlike the history of the US, Europeans, Indigenous Peoples and African migrants all intermingled in Venezuelan society especially during the 20th Century, since there were no segregation laws in place like the Jim Crow laws in the US, so this created a real sense of an amalgamated identity.

As Daniela Galán notes in her introductory essay to the book Amalgama: Women, Identity and Diaspora,

“An amalgam is an alloy, combining mercury with another metal. In this pairing, it joins into what appears to be a perfect union, elements of different natures or compositions. To separate them and expose their elementary components, one would need to evaporate the mercury, exposing toxic fumes the metal... thus the risk of separation materializes.”

So analyzing the intricacies of fusion is more complicated than it appears. Galán continues:

“On the one hand, it is undeniable that there was both cultural and ethnic miscegenation in Latin America; this highlighted the need to understand the different elements incorporated into the amalgam. On the other, for many Latin Americans, if this mercury were to be completely evaporated, they would lose one of the fundamental parts of their identity.”

This requires the need to think about identity in Latin America in general, and Venezuela in particular, not through separating these elements into their discreet pre-amalgamated components, but rather acknowledging the intricacies and interactions between one another.

The forced diaspora of Venezuelans, complicates this even further. Our loss is ambiguous, chaotic and gradual all at the same time. Many of us left our homeland thinking we would return, thinking we would only temporarily leave our motherland behind. We left friends, we left family, we left homes unmarred still filled with our furniture, we left photo albums and all our belongings intact, thinking we would one day return. We have had to reconfigure our expectations of one day returning, as we process the reality of the loss. We have had to muster the strength we need to reimagine a future for ourselves as we both grieve and rebuild the futures we had once imagined.