I am in­ter­ested in the long­ing for home and spaces that are stored in my mem­o­ries. The house that I lost for­ever con­tin­ues to live on in me. This place from child­hood is in my mind and in­sists to me to live again. I con­sider the past, and I re­flect on not hav­ing lived pro­foundly enough in the old house that fills my heart. These mem­o­ries of home ex­pect to breathe through my paint­ings, I feel the need to re­cap­ture this site through my day­dreams. I fear that bit by bit my home in Caracas will be lost in the mists of time, and I vi­su­al­ize it as a shadow, or per­haps as a falling brush­stroke. The weight of not hav­ing my home and fam­ily near me is scat­tered in­side of me —the rooms, the stairs in my grand­fa­ther’s home that de­scended with such cer­e­mo­ni­ous slow­ness, nar­row cages mounted in a spi­ral mo­tion, in the dark­ness of which I walk to­day know­ing I won’t see it again. It is this weight that I at­tempt to free through paint­ing. In other words: my work is not about see­ing or in­vent­ing, but about re­veal­ing a ver­sion of my re­al­ity through the dis­tor­tions of my mem­ory.

While spend­ing time read­ing and work­ing on my writ­ing in this tran­si­tional pe­riod, I have come not to a cer­tain wis­dom but per­haps to a cer­tain sense. I ask my­self, what does be­ing a painter mean to me? I sup­pose it comes down to sim­ply be­ing true to my imag­i­na­tion and to my his­tory. When I paint some­thing, I think of it not as be­ing fac­tu­ally true, but as be­ing true to some­thing deeper. When I treat a sur­face, I treat it be­cause some­how I be­lieve in it—not as one be­lieves in mere his­tory, but rather as one be­lieves in a dream or an ideal. That’s some­thing that paint­ing does for me that no other for­mat can. I merely try to con­vey what the dream is. And if the dream is a dim one (in my case, it usu­ally is), I do not try to beau­tify, or even to un­der­stand it, I just trust that mo­ment.