“Flesh was the reason oil painting was invented”

-Willem De Kooning

Fleshes are hand-tinted silver gelatin prints, painted using the methods of the old painting masters: thin layers of translucent colors, one over the other to let the light pass through. Eventually enough layers accumulate to trap the light in. A vibrancy begins to emanate . Something like living.

The works are organized in a four by four grid, similar to the style of art known as Casta Paintings—a genre of typological paintings that emerged in colonized New Spain which attempted to quantify and organize the miscegenation happening throughout the americas. The rules set about in Casta sets confound however. The force of Whiteness and an imagined purity of blood overwhelm the system.