This one was painted in a single, 16-hour session. I kept the entire surface wet to blend and blur everything together at the end. That followed a long prep session (measurements, masking tape, etc.), which came after a month of color mixing and painting small studies until it reached the mood I wanted — a spectrum spanning from the ether to fire to blood to dirt.
"Spectrum", 2026, oil and acrylic on canvas, 66" x 77".
Currently on view in LA @luisdejesuslosangeles
If you're in LA, I'd love to see you this Saturday at the opening of my show, "Flags", at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
With my new works, I tried to make abstractions that propose the opposite of the visual language used to express national identities in flags. I wanted to imagine a formal vocabulary that would suggest -- if we accept to consider these abstractions as "flags" -- a group of postnationalist, pluralistic entities. I wanted the works to collectively give the "vibe" of a world defined by mixing and change; a world we should feel intuitively, like the weather or a premonition.
Flags
Opening Saturday April 25, 4-7pm
On view until June 6
@luisdejesuslosangeles
1110 Mateo St, Los Angeles, CA 90021
This painting:
Phase Shift
2025-2026. Oil and acrylic on canvas mounted on wood, 66" x 80"
Two new paintings for my upcoming exhibition, "Flags", at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Opening April 25, 2026.
Given the political situation, I wanted my next show in the US to be about post-nationalism. The starting point for the exhibition was the desire to take on the flag, this supreme icon of nationalism, and to reverse its logic. Traditional flags deploy simple graphic elements and a few pure colors to produce a clear, exclusive signifier of identity (such as the myth of national identity — one homeland, one people, one culture). I wanted to make works that, while evoking the idea of a flag, visually and emotionally contradict its principles.
Instinctively, I pursued a vision of graphic forms dissolving into the rendering of matter itself. As a result I made a series of abstractions that mostly rely on brushed fields of color with little contrast of light and shadow, so that the images seem to float, in motion. Some of the works have so little contrast of light/shadow that they're ready to disappear the moment our eyes stop focusing. (Very hard to photograph -- the camera boosts contast.)
I'll add more images and context in my next posts.
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"Portals"
2025-2026. Oil and acrylic on canvas mounted on wood panel, 66" x 80"
This diptych ("We Enjoy The Proximity of Others", 2011-2012) and other works will be at the Plein Sud gallery for an unusual exhibition starting this Saturday, Jan 25. It is something of a return to my roots, since Plein Sud is located at the cégep Édouard-Montpetit, Longueuil, Qc, where I began my studies in art a long time ago. For the occasion, curator Marianne Cloutier, who was a student at the cégep at the same time as me, has brought together a selection of my works from the last 15 years.
Opening reception Sat Jan 24, from 2 to 5 p.m.
The exhibition will run until March 28.
@plein.sud.centre.exposition
Just finished this one after letting it sit for years. When I made the first sketch, my studio was in that hole, in Skid Row, LA. It's really hard to make paintings directly about Skid Row -- attempts I've made over the years always felt wrong in one way or another. It's not as if I'd finally done it with this one, obviously. I'd need to paint like Otto Dix and live on the streets for weeks before I could begin to do the place justice. But for now, here's a hole in the map.
A few highlights from a (relatively) recent trip to Japan:
1-The priest Baozhi, transforming into the Eleven-Headed Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva upon reaching nirvana. Wood sculpture, 11th century, Heian Period, Kyoto National Museum.
2- Rahula pulling open his chest to reveal Buddha's head inside. Edo period, around 1664, Kyoto National Museum.
3-"Reflection" by Antony Gormley, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
4- Mount Fuji seen from somewhere near Hakone.
5-Sculptures at Chingodō, a small Shinto shrine in Asakusa (Tokyo) dedicated to the tanuki, a small, furry animal that is a mainstay of Japanese folklore, sometimes compared to the North American raccoon.
6- Garden at the Hokokuji Temple, near Kamakura
7 & 8- Sculpture on someone's front yard in Kamakura.
9- Woodblock print by Kitagawa Utamaro, 19th century, with Yamauba breastfeeding Kintarō.
Painting from 2019 about fake visionaries. Unfortunately it seems to become an increasingly literal description of the current political & technological shit show.
"The oracle, of course, turned out to be a reactionary
He talked of a revolution:
Being on top
And pushing down
Those who were on top
The visionaries, of course, were not visionaries
They were just bullies"
(Installation at @bradleyertaskiran_ )
I made this little painting a few years ago without much thought or preparation, I just improvised it for fun. Since then I've become quite attached to it, probably because I'm incapable of making this type of semi-casual paintings when I try. I'm too much of a control freak; as soon as I decide that I'll paint a thing, it becomes a project and I get obsessed with it. Then occasionally I'll just try something random with some paint left on an old palette, and a small, humble surprise emerges from nowhere, and I think, huh, if only I knew where that came from, who knows what I could pull from the void? But that's the thing: I can't. So instead I push my good old boulder to the next painting.
Imaginary flags for a hypothetical post-nationalist world order. ((NOT "made with AI" -- even though Instagram added that annoying label...))
I did the mural -- charcoal, acrylic emulsion and black gesso -- a few weeks ago for the program Pinturas Rupestres at Fundación/Op.Cit. in CDMX, run by the wonderful @lorenamal and @pablo.rasgado
At the end of the residency, the mural was peeled off the wall and will perhaps resurface at some point in the future...
Thank you Lorena & Pablo for the inviation, I had amazing time at @opcit_org
