The presence of the animal in my work has a dual purpose: on the one hand, it represents the fury, savagery, and chaos in the human perception of the natural world; on the other hand, it represents the idea of an essence and a sacred presence that unites, like a link, two worlds that are supposedly divorced from one another while also reinforcing a sense of separation from nature.

My paintings deal with my questions surrounding the timeless relationship and connections we maintain with the animal world. With humor and curiosity, I have created a universe where the edges are unnecessary and where we are a single consciousness immersed in this reality. It excites me to play with the idea of animality and its iconography, which is so prevalent in human culture from sacred texts of heroes who faced beasts, to fairy tales, and even to contemporary expressions of animal imagery on TV and movie screens. It is apparent, from these ever-present expressions of animal imagery, that we have failed to integrate.

The current moment pushes us to look at that which is hidden and invites us to look at ourselves, so that we may begin to understand that this separation from the animal is not the truth, that our connection with this “other reality” that is wild and sacred and archetypal, is present in every corner of our culture and that, in moments of vulnerability, we remember more easily what is essential to us. Outside Myself is nothing more than an affirmation of myself, of my call to realize that beyond portraying the world, my obsession has always been to see myself and to build the bridges needed to see myself in others.

For years, I have been playing with those ideas from different angles, particularly drawing on my life spent in a city like Caracas and my memories of its wildness and the violence, savagery, and chaos in this city. For me, it was a lesson and a beautiful opportunity to take advantage of that primary pulse that never abandoned me and to turn that pulse into a visceral, spontaneous, and unrestricted relationship with painting. Now, in this moment of survival and vulnerability, caused by the pandemic and by my status as an immigrant, it is still pertinent to evoke our natural strength and, like an alchemist, to transform, play, express, and feel that which is both inside and outside oneself in order to build these hybrid and promiscuous images that heal and quiet my being.

Each work appeared spontaneously, moved by the pulse of each action to paint in connection with me, in introspection, without closing myself off to what I see in this new reality that I am living in these Mayan streets, full of multi-lingual conversations, which, more than images, give me sensations to take up the brush. While things were happening outside and continue to happen, news of losses and healings, this set of works was being built daily, patiently, only with the pretense of doing what I love, filling the fabrics with images, playing with them and their senses, knowing that they tell us of strange and unlikely experiences or, at least, that’s what I was accustomed to think…

Outside of Myself is the result of successes and failures, of failed attempts, of frenzied chaos, of not knowing and of embracing, for a while, the uncertainty that has sheltered us in order to awaken our essential, wild, sublime, and sacred animal that inhabits the creative energy that each being carries with them.