HELLO HORACIO, WELCOME TO THE 4BYSIX FAMILY AND THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO CHAT TO US ABOUT YOUR ART PRACTICE AND THE WORK YOU HAVE MADE FOR OUR VEHICLES FOR CHANGE INITIATIVE. 

TO START, AS YOUR WORK OFTEN COMBINES BEAUTY WITH THE GROTESQUE AND UTOPIAN VISIONS WITH DYSTOPIAN ONES, HOW DID THIS INTEREST IN CONTRASTING FORM FIRST EMERGE IN YOUR PRACTICE?

I think it comes from something very personal how I experience reality myself. I’ve always felt that nothing exists in just one register. Beauty carries something unsettling 

within it, and what seems grotesque often holds a kind of grace. For me, these tensions aren’t opposites - they’re the same thing seen from different angles. Growing up in Mexico, you’re constantly surrounded by that duality: in the art, the landscape, the culture. The sacred and the profane sitting side by side. I didn’t choose to work with contrast, it chose me. It’s simply how I see the world.

MANY OF YOUR PAINTINGS EXPLORE THEMES OF GENDER, ECOLOGY, AND IDENTITY THROUGH DREAM-LIKE LANDSCAPES AND HYBRID BODIES. WHAT ORIGINALLY INSPIRED YOU TO BRING THESE IDEAS TOGETHER IN YOUR WORK?

It all started with the body, my own body, to be honest. Asking myself what it means to inhabit a form, to be made of flesh that also carries history, desire, memory. From there, I could no longer separate the personal from the ecological or the political. The body isn’t isolated - it’s a territory. It absorbs everything: colonial histories, economic flows, environmental damage. So, when I paint a hybrid figure, I’m not just creating something fantastical. I’m asking: what has been deposited into this body? What forces have shaped it? Gender, ecology, identity for me.

COULD YOU ELABORATE ON HOW SURREALIST NARRATIVES, OFTEN ROOTED IN HISTORICAL MOVEMENTS AND MYTHIC OR SYMBOLIC IMAGERY, INFORM YOUR PRACTICE, AND HOW YOU REINTERPRET OR APPLY THEM TO REFLECT CONTEMPORARY LIFE?

What I find useful in surrealism is its insistence that the inner world is just as real as the external one. But today, that premise is intensified, surreal is the new real. With technological and medical advances, alongside current historical events, the boundary between the real and the “surreal” has become increasingly blurred. I’m not interested in escapism. My images may feel dreamlike, but they’re grounded in materiality, the body as an accumulation of geology, memory, and history. I think of my work as a kind of weighted surrealism, where the strange isn’t an escape from reality, but a way of understanding contemporary life.

WHAT CONTINUES TO MOTIVATE AND SUSTAIN YOUR ARTISTIC PRACTICE? AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE OF DEVELOPING YOUR WORK, WHAT DRIVES YOU TO KEEP RETURNING TO PAINTING AND EXPLORING THESE THEMES?

The questions. Honestly, it’s the questions that keep me moving, because they never resolve. The more I paint, the more I realise I’m not building toward an answer, I’m deepening the search.

And there’s something about painting itself, the physical act, its slowness that keeps me grounded. In a world that moves so fast and demands certainty, the studio is a place where I can sit with uncertainty and call it productive. That feels increasingly necessary, not just personally, but culturally.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH GEOLOGICAL OR MATERIAL ELEMENTS TO PAIR WITH A PARTICULAR SCENE OR BODY?

It’s partly intuitive and partly very deliberate. I spend a lot of time thinking about what different materials carry - historically and symbolically. Mineral matter, for example, has this incredible double life: it’s ancient, geological, pre-human, but also deeply entangled with extraction, colonialism, and capitalism. When I place mineral textures onto or within a body, I’m thinking about that weight. The body becomes a site where those histories become visible. So, the material isn’t decoration it’s an argument. It’s asking: what has been extracted from this territory, and at what cost?

YOU RECENTLY MADE A NEW WORK, CANVAS STRETCHED OVER A RECYCLED PLASTIC PANEL, FOR 4BYSIX. DID THE NATURE OF THE PANEL SPARK ANY INSPIRATION FOR THE GEOMORPHIC FEATURES PRESENT IN THE WORK?

Absolutely, and in a way I didn’t expect. When I started working with the recycled plastic panel, I couldn’t stop thinking about the life that material had before it reached my studio. It had already been something else it had circulated, been used, discarded, and Transformed. That connects directly with my interest in understanding matter as something non-neutral, as something that carries a biography. The panel activated something in the work. It made the geomorphic elements feel even more charged, because the support itself functions as a record of contemporary consumption, almost like a recent geology. Also, the fact that the piece was created with the intention of being auctioned to support the causes promoted by 4BYSIX adds another layer of meaning. It makes me feel that the work doesn’t operate only on a symbolic level it can also have a concrete impact and contribute, from within my practice, to something beyond painting.

CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE WORK YOU HAVE MADE AND WHAT THEMES, IDEAS, OR PROCESSES YOU ARE EXPLORING. HOW DOES IT RELATE TO OR EXPAND ON YOUR PREVIOUS WORK?

The work, titled Inward Gaze, continues the conversation I began in El peso de lo inmaterial and deepens this investigation where body and matter intertwine. The title is not accidental, it points toward an inward gaze, but one that understands this “interior” as dense, material, and charged with history, rather than as an abstract space. I’ve started to think of bodies as landscapes and landscapes as bodies, formations that have absorbed colonial flows, mineral extraction, and different forms of violence. The figures are hybrid, neither fully human nor fully geological, but something in between. I conceive them as presences, shaped by these pressures, that brush against each other, embed into one another, and sustain each other. Through that inward gaze, they ask to be seen.

YOUR WORK ENGAGES WITH THEMES OF ECOLOGY AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODIES AND ENVIRONMENTS. DO THE CURRENT GLOBAL CONDITIONS, LIKE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES AND SUSTAINABILITY, INFLUENCE YOUR PRACTICE, AND IF SO, HOW DO THESE CONCERNS MANIFEST WITHIN YOUR PAINTINGS?

Deeply, yes. Although I try not to be didactic about it, because I think art that lectures tend to close things down rather than open them up. What interests me more is making the ecological crisis felt rather than explained. The body in crisis, the landscape as a body in crisis - these feel like more honest entry points than slogans or symbols. I want someone to stand in front of one of my paintings and feel that something shifts some recognition that their own flesh is connected to the condition of the earth. That’s more powerful to me than any wall text.

FINALLY, CAN YOU TELL US HOW YOU ARE AND HOW LIFE IN THE STUDIO IS? ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON ANY NEW  THEMES OR PROJECTS?

Studio life is good, quiet and necessary, as always. Right now, I’m very focused on streamlining processes in painting. AI and other tools have played a big role in helping me develop sketches more quickly. This has allowed me to invest much more time in the painting itself and in the technique, something that was already visible in El peso de lo inmaterial. I’m trying to move toward  something more raw, more material, more grounded in the specific histories of extraction and colonialism that I want to confront directly. I’m excited and a little terrified, which usually means I’m on the right track. And honestly, being part of something like Vehicles For Change, making work that has a purpose beyond the gallery wall, has been really energising. It reminds me why all of this matters.