This exhibition that we present with enthusiasm at ARTWORKS, Blue Mall Punta Cana from August 26th to October 28th 2020, is my 36th individual exhibition and it is inspired by this damned pandemic in which I have lost great friends. Hoping that in the not too distant future, everything will be the same again, because I miss the kisses and hugs from family and friends, and besides, it is my first summer without my daughters because of the covid-19; their joy, their enthusiasm and that magic of innocence that makes me another boy, we play all day and I enjoy teaching them the games I played in my childhood, games that connect us to the spirit of my Dominican roots.
In my work I examined the vulnerability of man; especially in the context of the various natural events that we are destined to experience.
Before expressing an emotion or idea or feeling in my art, I compare it to my own experiences in order to put myself in the character’s shoes.
The materials I use become an emotional extension of my feelings and ideas. It’s funny that the more I suffer the blows and shocks of life the more prolific I am and the work frees me.
I try to represent in my work the different aspects and nuances of the human condition. I am particularly interested in the inner struggle of modern man; his need for love and his capacity for hate and envy, man’s constant struggle for survival, his anguish, his pride, pride and abuse of power, genocides, etc.
I wonder how the same experience and/or life events affect, mark and create such different outcomes and personalities. I am curious about motivation, its relationship to experiential reality and, finally, the decisions we make.
I like to call what I do with my art “Psycho-Expressionism”. Do you know what that is? I’ll try to tell you about the origin of this style, because it’s the best chance I have to do it given the sensitivity and vulnerability that this horrible pandemic has left us. I am sure that with this explanation in a general sense you will be able to connect and understand my proposal.
Introduction to Psycho-Expressionism
In 1994, while still a teenager in the cold city of Chicago, I had the pretense of putting a name to what I understood to be a unique way of making art, and I baptized it Psycho-Expressionism.
The main foundation of Psycho-Expressionism is more than expressing emotions, it is rather being able to explain them and thus represent the different emotional components that sustain human nature.
And with the desire to give meaning to this boldness that has accompanied me throughout my existence, I have investigated human behavior, always comparing it with my own experience. That restlessness and curiosity fostered in me a hope to escape from the hell I was going in and out of to guarantee the survival of my art. So it was that I reached a state of existential consciousness, without a doubt, consciously or unconsciously, every time I make art it is recorded in each of my works as the culmination of emotional events that have led me to direct contemplation of life, self-reflection and personal growth.
My artistic creations are evidence and testimony of my being, of my experiences. They are an accumulation of emotions that dictate and reveal my deepest impulses. Impulses derived from philosophical concerns; or simply my art is a representation of my voice, of who I am and what I am.
The ideas that I propose with my art are no more than my conclusions, about my interpretation of the role that memory plays in the character of man, which, in many cases, I present with characters that often show an intense look with an expression of pain, anguish and amazement.
For the development of my works, I have been formulating a series of elements that I have called configuration-language, or rather an alphabet that has been taking shape and coherence with time.
These symbols, composed of brushstrokes and bright colors, scratches, collages and spatulas, are made with the intention of creating a language of their own and coherent in my work.
I ask myself: why is memory selective? What are the experiences that remain registered in our conscience?
Symbology in my works:
Regularly divided the work with a vertical or horizontal line, the thickness of the line what it does is to create distance between both sides, the left side or the one of above represents the left hemisphere of the brain which takes charge of the logical functions, while the right side or the one of below takes charge of representing the emotions of feelings and depending on the degree of importance that I want to give to certain emotions it dedicated him greater space, and to represent memory and/or experiences, I paint small squares that can be underneath the central figure and/or around it that symbolize memory or rather the vivid-routine, which in most cases, we do not remember but which are an essential part of our personality. Similarly presented squares above, which represent invasion of experience.
And in the central figure, I present the intensity of the character depending on the degree of emotion that develops from these experiences, I register it on the canvas with layers of color, one over the other, and then, with my spatula, I remove certain areas with scratches, with the intention of leaving evidence that there is a past in the different layers of color and a history that symbolizes the evolutionary process.
The size of the squares represents the importance and the squares of contrasting colors, or within the same range of the background color to expose and represent situations in which we find ourselves day by day, because these leave a mark and a record in our memory that will shape the personality with each experience.
It is true that the discourse I put forward in my works are an extension of myself, I am my work and my work is me, whether conscious or unconscious. Art is ultimately the formula that has given meaning to my life, with resonance of my thoughts and the reality I have lived.
When I think and reflect on the reality of my art, I see it as a reference to be able to understand the ideology that binds me to this society and to the history of our time.
I have been able to observe that we are a society marked by dramatic and painful events and this was represented by masks, my own mask to symbolize that I put myself in the shoes of my characters.
In my case, I want my works to bear the traces of my memories and adventures; or that they become a symbolic refuge from my own reality, since I consider my art to be the result of constant questioning of the phenomenon of consciousness and memory.
For all these reasons, I would now like to invite you to discover the evolutionary process of my art and the stories behind it; for I believe that my work would become more understandable if I were to expose some events in my life, a life that has evolved from a series of incidents, often painful and significant, that gave me, at the same time, strength, courage and a deeper understanding of who I am.