"As a mixed Indigenous person with only fragments of family history, the artist turns to these figures, recasting them as protagonists moving through contested spaces. Repeated across the canvases, they form a chorus of presence: visible, insistent and unerasable. Their wide- brimmed hats and vibrancy refuse to be muted or overlooked. Each Historiante is witness, performer, and storyteller, carrying fragments of collective memory and offering the artist a way to imagine lineage where displacement has obscured continuity."
"In Landscapes, these figures fuse with their surroundings: terrain seeps into their bodies as they spill outward into contours of the land. The landscape is recast as a participant. This inquiry resonates with urgency amid rising hostility towards refugees, both in the United Kingdom, where the artist is currently based, and in the United States, where he grew up undocumented after fleeing El Salvador's civil war. In response, Landscapes envisions terrain as multiplicity, fluid, porous, impossible to contain or claim."
Landscapes centers terrain as both subject and metaphor, positioning land as an active participant in stories of belonging and displacement. Repeated Historiante figures, drawn from Salvadoran dancer traditions, anchor a fractured narrative and become protagonists moving through contested spaces. The figures integrate with the landscape, with terrain seeping into bodies and spilling into contours of the land, suggesting multiplicity and porous boundaries. The works reflect experiences of migration and undocumented childhood across the United States and the United Kingdom and respond to rising hostility toward refugees. Layered gestures and overlapping perspectives collapse history, myth, and movement into embodied collective memory.
Read at Juxtapoz
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