My landscape paintings use light and shadow as physical subjects, considering outdoor spaces—often parks and roadsides—close to me. I use plaster to build texture beneath the paint, embedding landscape ephemera while referencing the complex information systems that exist in nature.

 Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, I started taking painting classes at the age of ten with a Cuban artist who had studied in Spain. So, my training was traditional.

 My work emerges from my practice of seeing. Observing nature and myself, I witness transient ephemera such as shifting shadows on pavement or the colors visible when closing my eyes to kiss my partner. Engaging with fluid acrylic paints, I work instinctively, reacting in collaboration with the mediums and allowing the fluidity of the suspended pigments to employ its own movements and inform my next gesture. It is through this practice that I learn to embrace, rather than fear, the changes that I cannot control.

 What began as simply drawing upon my immediate surroundings during the Covid pandemic shutdown in 2020, these recent paintings have evolved into explorations of a kind of magical realism. Subjects seem to awaken with sentience, embarking on hallucinatory journeys that intertwine pleasure and conspiracy. Through this transformation, the ordinary dissolves into a realm where the mundane and the paranormal, desire and paranoia, bleed freely.

 Within these unnatural botanical landscapes, the viewer is invited to explore and ponder the realities and possibilities of symbiotic relationships. I have always been influenced by science fiction, but today the reality of science’s impact on society is a surprisingly fractious subject. Whether trying to survive a pandemic, dodge mysterious drones, or combat the effects of climate change, our daily lives include confronting nature in beautiful and terrifying situations.

 When I was growing up in Senegal, I would climb to the roof of my apartment building to sit and drink my coffee in the afternoon sunlight. Now, the sun streams through the windows in my studio, casting golden rays on many paintings of the sky that I’ve made. When real sunlight moves across a painted sky it creates an ethereal loop, as if the sky is looking in on itself. In other windows, sunlight gets caught in the curtains, saturating the fabric with a yellow glow and distorting the shadows cast by the trees outside.

 Through painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, I explore the story of human creation and survival across time. My research into global mythologies and art history views the various objects and artifacts we have created as fragmentary vessels of our collective identity: surviving wars, neglect, iconoclasm, and the forces of nature. From these echoes of events, a portrait emerges of ourselves across time.

 Personal Effects is a new iteration of Roberto Jamora’s series titled An Inventory of Traces. An attempt at committing important events of his life to memory via painting, for Jamora, each gradient is a vignette of an experience, place, or person. Paint mixed with pumice gel is swiped across the canvas. Simultaneously, illusionistic space is anticipated and denied; a thin trace of color is revealed and color triggers recollections.

 Half Light. Like trying to remember a dream that is fading fast or wondering if a memory is true or invented, this work is fueled by a combination of personal narratives blended with scenes from mythology, the occult, paganism, historical folklore, urban legends, and bedtime stories of witches. These pieces address moments too difficult to describe, where elements come together to create surreal and otherworldly experiences.

 My work investigates the fractures and joinery between myself and the world around me in order to challenge the nature of my character. Oily, high chroma paint articulates forms and environments characterized by their luminosity. It is through metaphor, color, composition, and light that the intimation of my work reveals itself.