In the artist's words
Artist Statement
My work is rooted in the feminine as I have embodied, felt, and lived it, and every choice on the canvas follows from there, from how the figure is drawn to what the surface is made of to the wire sewn through it.
The female figure is represented as a single continuous line, and the restraint is deliberate: a refusal to place the artwork within the paradigm of the sexual object that women's bodies always have to confront. The lines are descriptors, pointers to the body's essential silhouette, the curve of a hip, the roundness of a cell, a single rendered eye, and the interior life of a woman's body, its ovaries, cell systems, and fertility, at work beneath the surface where no one thinks to look.
In my earlier canvases, when Eva Hesse and Robert Gober were my first inspirations, I built the surface from matte, smooth, granular layers of pumice and medium until the painting had a matte, slightly translucent skin, a body of its own. That skin has since become a body of liquid, glossy and saturated with color, layered until it holds the depth of water and finished so that it appears untouched by hand. The aim is a visual illusion of suspended liquid caught in mid movement, and within it cell systems, constellations, figures, or ovaries take shape.
Copper wire runs through the canvas, sewn by hand, and though it began as a metaphor for energy, a conductor, it became something else the moment it was in my hands, where it feels and looks like hair, one of the ways women live our femininity every day. The wire traces the figure and crosses it, casting a shadow that follows the light and the viewer standing before it, so that the painting keeps slipping between two and three dimensions. Sewing carries into the work a labor long assigned to women and long kept outside the frame of fine art, and it arrives as structure, holding the figure together and going almost unnoticed until the shadow gives it away.
Color is where the feminine is most visible. The purples, cyans, yellow-greens, and deep blues come from my childhood in Puerto Rico, from coral reefs and the changing light on the ocean, and I use them as a direct reference to the female, knowing that beauty in painting was filed under the decorative and kept away from what counted as serious art. Reclaimed here as an aspect of the feminine, it works alongside humor and subtlety, with what you see at once and what reveals itself only if you stay.
From afar, the paintings read as fields of color, and up close comes the moment when the unseen looks back, an eye drawn so carefully it seems to have been waiting, and often a small smile that has been meeting your gaze the whole time, happy you came closer.
Three artists keep me company in this. Maria Lai's work lives in the sewing itself, in the labor of the feminine carried through thread until stitching becomes a language, and the copper wire sewn through my canvases descends from that same hand. Vanessa German's sculptures are about courage and vulnerability at once, bold and clear in their materials, built from crystals and saturated color into figures of the feminine body that are gorgeous, funny, and confrontational in their presence, and it is that fearlessness in front of the viewer that I admire and reach for in my own smiles and hidden eyes. a'driane nieves brings vulnerability and boldness into abstraction, and her process, the way she articulates it, her use of color, and the scale of her large-format paintings are a never-ending source of inspiration for the way color carries the feminine across my own surfaces. Through them the series carries that womanhood toward the pull between perception and consciousness, and the possibilities inherent in what the body keeps from view.
What is constant
In the creative process, my objective is to create a situation that forces my [physical] self and intuition to be completely “in the moment”.
Most of the time I hope my intuition takes over and then I find what I’m looking for:
an aesthetic solution to restlessness.