This exploration began with the built environment. My hometown of Los Angeles functions as an immense collage made up of a hodgepodge of diverse elements: an accumulation of architectural histories, formal references, legible structures of power, and in-your-face iconography. This awkward and fragmented yet unified environment carries a persistent sense of dissonance, and I was drawn to how these formal and spatial qualities coexist and relate to one another. Los Angeles revealed itself as a stratified palimpsest and this condition informed my desire to explore the dissonance embedded within its visual and spatial systems.
Paying attention to how meaning operates in space, in an urban and architectural context, led me to notice how meaning operates similarly in language. This became most apparent to me in the way words relate to one another. Words don’t have meaning because of their essence, but because of their relation to one another. Something can only mean something when it’s next to something else, and words alone don’t carry understanding from one person to another. They function as signals that are interpreted through memory, context, and difference. Meaning is not transmitted but produced relationally. I approach painting through this same logic.
This produces a Frankenstein-like cohesion: an accidental beauty that parallels the postmodern urban condition of Los Angeles, where fragments, histories, and intentions are held together without resolving into a seamless whole. In this sense, my work holds space for disorder rather than dissolving it. Meaning remains relational, informed by a balance of freedom and order, and experienced through tension rather than the comfort of resolution.
LOS ANGELES
CALIFORNIA & CASABLANCA MOROCCO
b.1994