Hazy Zodiac Paintings Play With Augmented Reality To Convey a Message of Wonder [Interview]

How did your painting journey begin?

The beginning of my painting journey was complicated, because my academic background up to that moment was scientific. As a child, I wanted to be an astrophysicist, so all my academic interests and achievements were aimed at that. I took extra lessons in physics and was very interested in genetics. However, when the time came to enroll in university something inside me told me I needed something more, a new challenge to explore, I needed a different point of view to help me explain to myself the world around me, to complement that worldview.

I’ve always had a big sense of curiosity and experimentation, so that led me to the art, because even if I liked it, I didn’t really know it. When I got into art school I didn’t even know where the school was. At first, I thought I had made a mistake, but I was lucky to attend lessons with teacher Luis Nishizawa and then fell in love with art, specifically painting.

I remember well the feeling I had when I realized that painting was also a kind of alchemical mixtures, which also allow experimentation and discovery of the world, the way in which the eye has to be trained to observe things in a different way and interpret them through the brush, that made me fall in love, and I decided that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Obviously, it was difficult for me at the beginning because I didn’t have previous artistic training so I devoted a lot of time and effort to learning and practicing techniques since I knew I was at a disadvantage. Art—painting—opened up a completely new world full of possibilities, in which I could not only experience the physical world but the spiritual because, what is the universe if not the complementation of yin and yang with all its possible variants? Painting is the language through which I share my vision of the world.

What drew you to the zodiac as a theme for an art project?

Although, as I mentioned before, I completely fell in love with art, I never forgot my passion for science, specifically astronomy. To this day, I can’t help but look at the stars and wonder, what is out there that looks so beautiful from Earth? Why have we always been mesmerized by them? Who was the first human being that looked at them and thought: that cluster of bright dots look like this or that?

I know I’m not the only person that wonders about these things, and somehow these questions are what led us to name each constellation, and zodiac signs are a way to answer these and other questions, a different way of explaining what we observe. There is a type of innate language in the mundane because not all people know about constellations, but most do know about their zodiac sign and that is an equally valid way of understanding our world. I believe that we are intimately linked to the universe and its transformations so we can not move away completely from our need to understand them.

What does your creative process look like?

My creative process varies a lot; it changes according to the theme or the people I work with, but usually, it starts with an idea that I spin around a lot in my head before materializing it. Afterwards, in the development stage I allow myself to experiment with different mediums and techniques to express the idea I originally had in mind visually. Each idea is like a cloud, different from one another. Each project demands its own methodology and is developed in its own way since I also like to work in collaboration with other people, and you have to keep in mind that everyone works differently, so the processes change according to all the variables that are coming together at the time.

Can you elaborate on the augmented reality part of the series? How does it engage with the traditional oil on canvas composition?

For me, augmented reality is another tool that I can use to experiment with my visual language. Traditional oil painting is in itself a medium for artistic expression, and AR is simply a way to complement an idea. For example in the ZODIACO series, AR allows me to show the viewer the constellations of each zodiac sign as seen through a telescope, not exactly the same, but to bring them closer to that. I think that digital technologies can coexist and work with traditional mediums.

On the other hand, it allows me to give another dimension to the pictorial work. I have an oil painting that already tells us something and expresses an idea, but with the AR, another dimension is discovered within the same work; it is a second view of the same idea. And I cannot avoid mentioning again the complicity between yin and yang because the complicity between painting and AR is very similar, a complementarity between the two that allows me to present two pieces in the same space-time. Two interpretations that far from competing merge into one, opening thousands of possibilities.

The works seem to have a blurry quality, almost like yielding the spotlight to geometry in the foreground. How did that come to be? Is there a reason behind this choice?

Yes, the work is meant to look blurry. When I was first approaching the project, I thought about everything that comes with something as strongly charged as the zodiac signs, their history, their changes, and their transformations over time, and I thought “How they will be seen in the future?” I think they will probably change, and those potential new changes are undefined, blurry for now in the same way people who studied them before our time saw the present. Scientific theories evolve as well—who can assure us that current knowledge is actually right? Nobody. Knowledge is changing and, therefore, is almost blurry. We will never stop learning and discovering new things, and every time it happens, we will feel that the image becomes clearer, but in reality, it is a constant blur.

I also thought about the idea of looking. What power does the human gaze have? What is it that led us to name the constellations? Observation is a fundamental part of our knowledge, we are sensory beings and therefore we study and understand what surrounds us through our senses, I in particular do not have good eyesight and that on the one hand worries me because I am a painter, but on the other hand I can experiment with this.

When I take my glasses off, my world looks like my zodiac paintings, but if you stand far enough, the images become clear, like when a telescope makes the stars look nearer. I was wondering how the way we look at something changes from where you stand. After all, according to current theory, the observation of matter can alter its state and, therefore, what is observed, but what really changes the result is the interaction, and that is why I like to make the observer interact with the work in a new dimension.

What do you hope people will take away from your art?

I would like it to be a reminder of how we evolve.