Digital Self-Portraits

About the Series

These are not selfies. They are acts of mythological self-invention.

Across ten years and nearly fifty works, El Pipirisnais has used his own face as raw material — fragmenting it into geometric patterns, filtering it through psychedelic color fields, dissolving it into topographic contour lines, crowning it with iguanas, consuming it with smoke and catastrophe, and reflecting it back in infinite symmetry. The self in these works is never stable, never finished. It is always in the process of becoming something else.

Made entirely on a mobile phone — downloaded apps, no institutional support — this body of work engages simultaneously with the history of Western portraiture and with Mexican visual culture, with Op Art and with street graffiti, with surrealism and with meme logic.