Statement

I am El Pipirisnais.

I make art because I have to. Not as therapy, not as devotion — as necessity. It's how I process being alive, and I've never been able to switch it off. Two decades in, that drive has produced hundreds of pieces: paintings, assemblages, sculpture, crowns, and a long run of digital self-portraits. The range isn't indecision — it's restlessness. Whatever an idea demands, I reach for it: a brush, a pile of beads and broken glass, a phone.

I keep painting and rebuilding my own face because the self is the most honest material I have, and the least finished. I'm not trying to show you who I am; I'm testing who I could be — fracturing a portrait into geometry, flooding it with color, crowning it, masking it, mirroring it until one face becomes a crowd. I came up in Los Angeles — East Hollywood, late nights, costume and performance, the Chicano image-world I grew up inside — and I treat all of it as raw vocabulary: saints and lowriders, Op art and street writing, glamour and grit, the holy card and the meme. I'm not precious about where an image comes from. I'm exact about what I do with it.

The crown is my through-line. I set it on the brown, queer, working-class figure — usually myself — not as a prayer but as a claim: a decision about who gets to be looked at that way. The work is loud, ornate, political, tender, and unbothered by good taste. It's maximal because I am.

I'm El Pipirisnais. I made all of this — and I'm nowhere near done.