The works of art I have been doing for more than thirty years ago —unconsciously at first and aware for more or less the last twenty— have based on the idea of sampling as a philosophy of research and production. Initially, this idea emerged in my mind connected to my musical likes and needs, but later it transformed into the aesthetic and practical basis of all my artistic work, including in visual arts.

When I came to live in Miami less than a year ago, I started an artistic investigation that I called “New Compositional Thinking, Vol. I,” in which I intervened historical images of petroleum production in Venezuela with a red thread. These images, made by different authors, were published more than a decade ago in an issue of ExtraCámara magazine devoted to the theme. Afterwards, I began to work on this new project that follows the path open by the precedent. For this reason, I have named it generically as “New Compositional Thinking, Vol. II.” In this case, I have intervened, with pills of personal medication, the Paolo Gasparini’s photographic book Retromundo edited in Venezuela in 1986. 

I understand my work with this book as a conceptual action. I am interested in exploring reflexively the elements that integrate and configure my daily world and its flux with my life experiences. I do not do that from an intimate perspective. On the contrary, I do it from an archeology of self (the pills I take every day can convert itself into archeological personal rests).

From this point, my artistic work searches for a transgressive and contingent dialog with the particular discourses of Latin-American modernities and, specifically, with those inscribed into the context of Venezuelan history. My photographic compositions with pills placed on fragments of the book Retromundo, do not articulate or display an epic or nostalgic regard on the visions of the author of original photographs. They are unlike aesthetic breaches. The pills function as factors of association with the personal world of anyone. They are samples of an altered modernity or contra-modernity.