Statement

Nahúm Flores Artist Statement
My work features small scale, drawing-based paintings on a wide variety of surfaces. I use canvas, paper, wood, and nonconventional surfaces such as time worn bottle-caps, crushed cans, and sardine tins that I have picked up on daily walks and travels.

In these compositions, layers of meaning are subtly revealed through the build up of mixed media. A cast of characters emerge from my subconscious wanderings, and are subject to change and evolve over time. In this way, the works expose my journalistic process, wherein everyday thoughts and experiences— both tangible and imaginary— are fused to create a commentary that resounds on a personal and collective level.

Multi-layered and complex, these works deal with questions of identity and wholeness, posed through physically fractured, amorphous characters depicted in isolated landscapes. The characters invoke my exploration of the tensions between the personal and the historical, life and death, containment and fluidity, humor and severity, concealment and exposure, as well as memory and absence.

The works can be read both individually and collectively, communicating beyond the margins that appear to simultaneously separate and unite them. The viewer is left to ponder the state of flux and fractured nature of my characters and their environments. Without the stability of our sense of time and place, we are left in an unnerving state of transition.