This body of work emerged from an interest in depicting the imagined point of view of objects, a Mesoamerican figurine in an online auction, a decorative sun face hanging on a wall. Both images of isolation made me wonder what an object yearns for, what does a painting yearn for, a material. If they could communicate would I have the ability to understand their language?

I started to consider the paintings themselves as objects. Instead of referencing the precarious situations objects found themselves in, I began to translate aspects of them into paintings with their own agency, tangible and dense. Paintings that pushed back and rejected the brushstroke and the image.

I saw this line of inquiry as an opportunity to experiment and remove the separation between representational and abstract painting in my work. I thought of these different modes of working as ways to communicate the same idea in different languages. Much like the referenced objects, the paintings ultimately highlight their inherent resistance to be read, functioning within these gaps in translation.

Victor Ballesteros

Thank you to Alaina Munoz and Keywan Tafteh for the help with documentation and the entire 2021 Honors Cohort, Anya and Monique.