LBG

On February 27th 2026 I organized an exhibition/celebration that showed my portraits with the actual people I painted. It was held at Club Naima in Oaxaca and it was open to the public but was meant to celebrate the people in my community.

Please see all portraits below

Artist Statement
The only constant in human experience is change. Identities change, technologies change, cultures change. However, every change also brings consequences, allowing us to evaluate whether it aligns with our values.

I believe we are abandoning communal forms of society for increasingly individualistic ones, where the ego triumphs over the collective. This is clearly expressed in the cult of self-image—the selfie, the ego designed for immediate consumption. The changes brought about by this hyper-consumer society are eroding our social fabric, as people become increasingly disconnected—from their immediate communities, from nature, and even from themselves. People are encouraged to produce caricatures of their outward appearance on social media and spend less time exploring their interior lives and communal worlds.

Faced with this contemporary condition, I created this series of paintings with the aim of acknowledging my community and recognizing myself through it, because perhaps our own portrait is composed of the portraits of those around us.

I have lived in Mexico on and off for over forty years, but when I arrived in Oaxaca in September 2022, I barely knew anyone. Little by little, I forged a small community of friends and acquaintances, and the people in these portraits represent those who have helped me create a sense of belonging to something I sense is larger than myself—something that is anything but superficially motivated.

My work seeks to celebrate and acknowledge people who might never have been portrayed. Historically, portraiture in Western society functioned as an elitist means of preserving the memory of powerful or extraordinaryindividuals. By appropriating this tradition, I instead choose to focus on everyday people, without the word “everyday” implying any disregard. On the contrary, not only are these people extraordinary individuals, but I recognize through them the importance of the everyday, of microhistory, and of a reality constructed from the ground up, within the community itself.

It is true that photography and digital imaging have broadened the possibility for anyone to be artistically represented, thus democratizing the traditional elitism of portraiture. However, I am not interested in producing quick works that reinforce mass consumerism, the cult of the ego, or the logic of a Western artistic hegemony that turns portraiture into a tribute to the ego. On the contrary, I have created these portraits with the intention of showing the faces of the working people in our community, who, through their labor and skill, build a living historical memory.

These works are not created as fetishized or exotic objects of consumption, nor as a means of appropriating the history and culture of a place without giving anything back to the community. On the contrary, my paintings aim to encapsulate both a historical record and an appreciation for the people who ensure the survival of the community.

I consider this to be both an artistic and an emotional gesture. Both because it stands in opposition to the Western tradition of portraiture and because it aims to pay homage to the people close to my heart.

Faced with society’s strange logic of division and isolation, I hope to inspire and to help grow a strong, vibrant, and inclusive community together.