(Painting) "Inside Out — Seven Stars" is a large-format surrealist realist oil painting that merges personal memory with political elegy. At the center of the composition sits a weathered wooden ballot box, its face marked with the word voto and seven stars — a reference to the Venezuelan flag as it existed before Hugo Chávez's constitutional reforms of the late 1990s, before the eighth star was added and the country the artist knew as a child began its long transformation. The ballot box belongs to a version of Venezuela that no longer exists.

It is surrounded — overwhelmed — by a vast, turbulent sea of discarded ballots and scattered bolívares from the same era, each one rendered individually across a 48 by 60 inch canvas with obsessive precision. The accumulation is the point. Every ballot is a unit of civic participation — a gesture toward order — now buried and irretrievable. Every bolívar a remnant of an economy, and a country, that has since collapsed beyond recognition. The field is white ballots washed warm by a dying sun, the whole surface glowing parchment-gold in the long light of a setting day. Weathered harbor piles rise from the chaos, their shadows cutting hard diagonal lines across the surface — maritime infrastructure designed to orient and warn, present and purposeful and insufficient.

Perched atop the ballot box are three troupials (Icterus icterus), Venezuela's national bird, their bold black and yellow plumage cast burnt-orange by the dying light, the only vivid color against the warm, parchment-toned field. But unlike the composed, watchful birds of classical allegory, these three appear lost — disoriented, overwhelmed by the scale of what surrounds them, perched not from a position of authority but because there is nowhere else to go. They are witnesses, but unwilling ones, unequipped for what they are seeing. Their stillness reads not as indifference but as paralysis. All the right markers were in place, all the infrastructure of democracy present and functioning, and still the ballots are scattered, the bolívares buried among them, and the birds don't know which way is out.

Inside Out — Seven Stars is one chapter in a broader series about the struggle to maintain stability and sanity in environments that offer all the right guidance and still leave you adrift. Here, that struggle is political, autobiographical, and unrelentingly present — a childhood country rendered from the outside, in the precise and patient language of paint.

(Frame) "Inside Out — Seven Stars" is framed in purpleheart, a hardwood native to South America, including Venezuela. Freshly cut, the wood is a dull brown; exposed to light and air, it slowly deepens into a rich maroon or deep purple — the same sunlight that gives it color will, over years, wear that color away again. Left without heavy UV protection, the frame is intended to age visibly over time, its transformation left exposed rather than preserved.

That vulnerability is the point. Like the troupials perched atop the ballot box — the frame cannot shield itself from the forces acting on it. It will darken, deepen, and eventually fade, unevenly, at the mercy of whatever light finds it. And yet it still does its job: holding, protecting, and presenting the painting within it, even as it bears the same exposure the painting depicts. In this way, the frame carries the painting's central metaphor out of the image and into physical space — no longer depicted, but actually occurring. It becomes another witness to that same slow erosion — unable to intervene, but never failing to hold what it was built to hold.

Rev. 07/2026