– What I Must Say
Lo Que Tengo Que Decir
Lo Que Tengo Que Decir (“What I Have to Say”) is a body of work that emerges from a lifelong tension between speech and silence, visibility and erasure. Although words have appeared in my work for decades, this series marks the moment when language could no longer remain implicit. What had long existed beneath the surface – embedded in structure, pattern, gesture, and form – had to become present, yet not loud.
The first seed of this project was a painting I made in 1999 at Brandeis University titled You Don’t See Me. At the time, I did not yet have the full language to articulate what that painting already knew. It carried a truth that would take decades to unfold: that invisibility is not merely personal, but structural; that being misread, dismissed, or unseen is an experience that can shape an entire creative life. Lo Que Tengo Que Decir is the long emergence of that original insistence into a mature, deliberate visual language.
These works are not about legibility in the conventional sense. The words are often difficult to see, woven into the architecture of the image rather than placed upon it. They require proximity, time, and patience. This is intentional. Much of what matters most in lived experience is not immediately visible, not easily articulated, and not designed for speed. The text in these works functions less as declaration and more as residue—language that has survived compression, interruption, and containment.
The phrases embedded in these paintings originate from my own writing: essays, fragments, and reflections developed over years. Once incorporated into the visual field, the words lose their authority as language alone and become material. They bend, fragment, repeat, dissolve, and reassemble. Meaning is not delivered; it is encountered.
At the core of Lo Que Tengo Que Decir is the recognition that not being seen or heard is not a personal anomaly, but a structural condition – particularly for those whose identities, histories, or ways of thinking fall outside dominant frameworks. These works do not seek resolution. They hold contradiction. They acknowledge anger, tenderness, grief, resilience, and insistence simultaneously.
Formally, the series draws from my ongoing engagement with pattern, systems, and interconnection. The words become part of the same visual logic that structures my faces, roots, and networks. Language is treated as another living system—subject to pressure, growth, distortion, and emergence.
Lo Que Tengo Que Decir is not a conclusion. It is a threshold. It marks a moment when silence is no longer viable, yet speech must remain complex, layered, and embodied. What is said here is not offered for consumption. It is offered for recognition.
