Although my work engages in a sustained dialogue with painting, it is a dialogue that fosters tension in order to reconsider the varieties of what is called “painting” and to understand the reaches and limitations of the social definition of the “painter”. Often, my projects respond to specific circumstances that allow me to destabilize my own position as an artist by exploring heterogeneous representational strategies—those of advertising and graphic design, of the early Russian avant-gardes and popularized paleontological knowledge, of Godard's early films and vernacular science fiction—and by researching the possibilities of unfamiliar materials. My work is conceived as a medium for learning, and the characteristics of each project develop in light of an autodidactic urge to deal with topics such as the iconography of extinction, the cognitive potentialities of diagrams, the visual representation of social struggles or the connection between acts of vision and acts of motion.
In 2012, during a residency in Mexico City, I produced "A Failed Calling", after working for three months in a traditional rotulero workshop, confronting the artisanal production of commercial imagery in public spaces with the aspirations of Siqueiros’s and Rivera’s Great Mexican Muralism. On another occasion, as a commentary on the abuses of an art dealer, I videotaped myself destroying one of my paintings with a hammer, which I then put back together out of the resulting small fragments. During another residency in Nürnberg I produced "Sentimental Journey", an exploration of tourism, and an attempt to use the patient work of embroidery as a way of weaving affects and the possibility of a counter-nationalist heraldry. In 2012, I won the prize Nuevas Propuestas, hosted by the Alliance Française, where I exhibited "Remake", an installation featuring sculptures, a mural in chalk and a video-homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), where I enact iconic sequences from the film, referencing the history of armed struggle in Colombia and its problematic usage by local artists. In 2013 I was invited to contribute to the biennial 43 Salón Nacional de Artistas, and in 2014 I produced The Fabrication of Facts, a solo show that, drawing from pedagogical materials from the Museum of Natural History in Paris, analyze the scientific representation of natural processes. For my solo exhibition "Unfollow Me, Morning Star" at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellin (2017) I produced a series of 5 motorized paintings based on video studios of road travel in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California and then I produced “still” copies of these paintings, installed in reverse order, allowing spectators to experience the divergence between both presentations of the “same” image and the unexpected motionless elegance of images composed to be perceived in motion. The exhibition also included a series of paintings in which I shift my interest in the visual representation of biological phenomena, from a historical to a speculative dimension, seeking to envision potential microscopical or cosmic phenomena through paintings and sculptures that undermine the semantics of scientific and visionary abstraction.
Between 2005 and 2009 I was a member of El Bodegón, an independent artist-run space that produced more than a hundred exhibitions of Colombian and international artists along with other events. I am the bass player for the bands Las Ruinas Telepáticas, Montón Volador (since 2012) and Aurora Rampante (since 2015).
I hold a BFA from the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, California.