Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, a painting professor told me that I was not a painter, but an academic. Though meant as criticism, I smiled. For a long time I had believed my obsession with academic literature to be a weakness of my practice. Since the beginning of my artistic career, I knew how to manipulate material, focusing on how different surfaces refract and reflect light, and disrupting traditional portraiture to make the familiar look unsettling and strange. However, in the beginning, I felt I was lacking the tools to anchor my academic interests in social theories such as nationalism, globalization, gender, media, and identity into my image-making, creating an uncomfortable distance between my practice and my research.

I trace my creative breakthrough to when I first understood theory to be itself a material. Texts by theorists from all kinds of disciplines, such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Irina Troconis, Raymond Williams, Josef Albers and Eric Shouse amongst many many others, taught me how to situate myself amongst the theories. My paintings became a place where I could make sense of and expand upon new applications of their ideas, making the depths of my knowledge my greatest artistic strength.

My body of work demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between my practice and my research. My recent work is explicitly informed by my Venezuelan identity and my academic expertise in Latin American Studies, kernels of which are evident in earlier works but now drive my creative process. By treating my canvas itself as a site of research, I aim to render physical and tangible the otherwise inarticulable experiences of cultural memory, belonging, and reconciliation.