Magazine

How does your participation in Make-It-Pop! resonate with the exhibition’s emphasis on vibrant colors, graphic styles, and ironic subject matter?

My work is intentionally non-conforming. I’m drawn to the juxtaposition of bold color, the unexpected, and the collision between traditional art and the handcrafted elements often associated with so-called “untrained” art. By untrained, I mean I follow what makes me smile, what makes me pause, and what feels alive—without worrying about what formal art training would dictate. That freedom—working without rules, hierarchy, or reverence—is exactly what Make-It-Pop! means to me.

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What are your aspirations for viewers’ takeaways from experiencing your artwork in the Make-It-Pop! exhibition at InLiquid Gallery?

I want viewers to see that I like to “make it pretty” while also wanting to unsettle them. I’m interested in beauty that seduces and then surprises. And I want people to sense my gay masculine sensitivity—something I consciously inhabit both in my presence and in my artwork.

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Your collages layer paper, watercolor, and pastels to create a flat, saturated look. How did you develop this method?
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At its core, collage is one image layered over another. I began making collages about eight years ago while working full-time as General Counsel for a large nonprofit. I’d come home exhausted, and collage became my escape—my way of decompressing by putting figures together like a jigsaw puzzle, without fully knowing what I was doing. I’m intentionally self-taught. From the beginning, I was drawn to a flat, staged feeling as if the figures I was creating and assembling were set against a theatrical curtain. Over time I added pastels, pencil, watercolor, and hand-drawn elements to my collages, but I’ve kept that flat, staged quality. It signals that what you’re seeing is constructed—an illusion with a message.
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Your work Dog and Man transforms a real-estate magazine cover into a kitschy
tableau. How do you source and select found materials?

The selection process is never-ending. I spend hours going through magazines, art books, and even junk mail. The real-estate cover came from junk mail—I didn’t know what I would do with it, but something in it pulled me in. I tear out images from books, magazines, and junk mail that intrigue me, without always knowing why: a palette, a mood, a vague emotional charge. Later, when the idea clicks, I know what belongs together. With that real-estate magazine cover, I started by coloring it with watercolor and pastels, then remembered fragments from an art book that would sit perfectly inside the kitschy living-room scene. Much of my collage making (matching one image with another) is subconscious—my mind remembers pairings. My mind says “Hey—remember this goes with that.” Then I hunt down all the pieces, assemble, glue, color, manipulate, and create.

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Your practice layers cultural memory, spirituality, immigrant experience, and queer identity. Is there a piece in this exhibition that most clearly embodies these themes?

“Cruising” most clearly embodies those layers. As an immigrant to the United States, I was struck by how Americans often describe their country as “the best in the world”—a phrase Argentines use just as confidently about Argentina. It made me aware of how people can look at the same reality and see entirely different things, often through a self-focused lens.

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I experienced a similar shift in my own life. After many years in a heterosexual marriage and a wonderful, fulfilling relationship, I discovered a fluidity in myself and later began living more from my gay side. That change made the misunderstandings between heterosexual and gay cultures impossible to miss—sometimes the same behaviors, read through entirely different assumptions, experiences, and prejudices.
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“Cruising” reflects the hidden language men use to recognize one another. That coded invisibility fascinates me, and I wanted to render it cinematically—almost as Alfred Hitchcock might have staged it, in lush Technicolor, charged with tension and secrecy.

With a background in literature and law, does formal training translate into your visual storytelling?
After earning my degree in English and Spanish literature, I found myself unable to write. I felt overwhelmed by the weight of the Spanish and English writers I had read, and intimidated by their mastery. I turned to law, where my writing skills became an asset. A mentor once told me: “Before anything goes out from your office, read it again—not just for typos, but for clarity. For every mistake you catch, your client will find five more.” What he was really saying was: Respect your work. Make it readable. Make it beautiful.

I carried that mindset into my legal career and later into my art. When I began making art in my late fifties, I decided never to take an art class—I didn’t want to feel overshadowed by the masters. Instead, I applied the same meticulous attention to detail I had learned through writing and law. That decision also freed me to return to writing fiction, which I now publish on my blog with fictional and semi-autobiographical stories that explore my immigrant and queer experiences.
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You emphasize that your work is not parody but a mirror, where memory, glamour, and branding are inseparable. How do you use playfulness to reveal this?

I use playfulness the way a writer uses humor: to lower your guard. The images may look kitschy or funny at first, but the joke isn’t on the subject—it’s on us. I’m interested in the moment when glamour tips into longing, when branding slips into identity, and when nostalgia starts to feel like advertising. By staging those collisions—beauty with absurdity, sweetness with discomfort—I show how easily memory and desire get packaged, sold back to us, and mistaken for something “true.” The work becomes a mirror: bright, seductive, and a little embarrassing, because it reflects what we want to believe about ourselves.

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What draws you to staging domestic, consumer, or fashion scenes alongside references to art history, as seen in Gucci Xmas?

Those worlds aren’t separate. Fashion and consumer imagery already borrow the language of art history—pose, lighting, symbolism, even sanctity—and domestic scenes can be staged as carefully as a tableau vivant. I like putting them in the same frame because it exposes the shared machinery: aspiration, status, desire, performance. In Gucci Xmas, I’m not mocking the luxury fantasy; I’m showing how it operates—how it flatters us, how it scripts us, and how easily it becomes a kind of secular religion. When I place echoes of tradition inside a modern branded scene, the result isn’t parody. It’s recognition: the old icons are still here, but now they wear different clothes.