Premio Combat

Although I lives in San Francisco, I am from Venezuela, where I began to study and do art in 1998. I have a background in literature and journalism that I use for enrich my art.
I try to humanize abstract topics to allow viewers to become more aware of their environment and themselves by stimulating their imaginations.
For example, a truck crash on the side of the highway captures your attention. You cannot help but to have a morbid fascination with the twisted metal, the machine wounded but still powerful, its secret workings exposed for the world to see. The reaction is primal and visceral, much like a sexual response. The marriage of the two was made famous by David Cronenberg’s film “Crash” from the J.G. Ballard book.
Violence is one side of pornography; the other is sex. Porn is anonymous, obnoxious, absurd, and sometimes perversely intimate (like amateur photos of oneself taken in a mirror). By juxtaposing crash “porn” with sexual porn, “Accidental Erotica” attempts to reveal these things for what they really are, to re-sensitize us to the shock that the Internet’s ubiquity of images has rendered banal. My canvas shows a typically American street scene dominated by a crashed vehicle that in turn serves as a canvas for an even more disturbing reality that uses seduction as a form of violence. It is a conceptual mise-en-abime wherein the idea contains a stronger version of the idea.
"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." (J.G. Ballard, 1973) This is the direction I want to take for this project: I want to push the boundaries of the perception of our own bodies and how they influence our social relations, our emotions and fears. "