“Imperfect Boundaries” communicates edges, density, freedom, and constraint. These pieces are meant to have an arresting first impression and to lure you into the vortex while your eye wanders along the painted linework. The dense ink creates activity and depth - its absence creates breath and light. The edges of the shapes imply an invisible line that the ink is forbidden from crossing.

The paintings seek to balance liberty and restraint – a duality the artist negotiates with himself every day. The work represents his ambition to grasp and yield to the big picture, only to promptly [and often desperately] institute a sense of control upon it. As the artist has lived in cities with strong boundaries, this artwork tells the story of the world he sees around him. Now living in Tijuana and San Diego, he daily traverses a geographical boundary across the porous mesh between Mexico and the US. To the North of the border, a series of freeways connecting him with the rest of the county, and to the South, city blocks forcibly pushed up against only feet away from the wall. The relationship between these two sides of a political plane create a larger Home for the artist, whose whole signifies more than the sum of its parts, in a form of binational Gestalt.

“Imperfect Boundaries” is not shy about sharing its process as ink is naturally unpredictable. The darker strokes give away the painting’s scars. Instead of concealing, the artist strives to be more like the ink – celebrating his own emotional scars as lessons learned. As he works, each piece develops a personality of its own. He respects this growth process and considers it natural; there comes a point that the artist can only give the ink guidance as it makes its own decisions and forms its own identity. This isn’t very different in how we grow and how a community develops; organically and at times, independently of control.

In “Imperfect Boundaries,” absence is as important as presence. At a micro scale, the work reveals the artist’s own personal anxiety - a collection of thoughts - all present at the same time. On a larger scale, he believes the paintings reflect the tensions we all must contend with in our daily lives: the establishment of and respect for boundaries, the acceptance and even the celebration of the imperfect, the tug between complexity and simplicity, and the ever-present sense for equilibrium.