Pajarada / Fish in the Water gathers a series of explorations into self-portraiture adopting fauna as means of portrayal. Birds cloud the forefront of my memories fluttering along the deserted coastline, soaring over salt mines streaked with pink where Andean flamingoes gather, nesting near crumbling pre-Columbian temples etched with gods whose faces mirror the animals around them. I traveled often through these landscapes as a child, their colors and silences pressing themselves into me. In the portraits, forms drift between representation and abstraction, as I slowly forego the need for legibility.

The paintings are acts of symbolic dissection, anthropomorphizing and dissolving in equal measure, as I use the bird to speak about presence, distance, and the sediment of self. In these works the bird becomes a way to examine my sense of value—its presence not as something certain, but as a repetition, a persistence that near them is something worthy.

I also revisited myths I grew up with in the Peruvian Amazon—especially the bufeo colorado, the pink river dolphin that turns into a man to seduce, drown, and impregnate women. I painted a man’s face stretched over the back of a dolphin, both predator and object, carrying the ambiguity of beauty, desire, and harm. These paintings were a way of testing symbols I’d inherited, letting them unravel and reform.