Within these many machines of maybe, I fold in the historical tongues of modernism that have been moving through my work for years: Bauhaus discipline and its clean geometry, Art Deco’s bright decorative faith, the crisp modular logic of midcentury design, Googie’s upbeat, jet-age futurism, and Memphis with its cheerful refusal to behave. I’m not interested in pinning any of this down as a set of sealed-off chapters. Instead, I let the movements blur and bunch together until they start speaking as a single, speculative visual language that feels like mine.
Forms repeat, but not as ornament for its own sake. They start acting like cells, circuits, architectural blocks, particles, components of an unfamiliar device, little systems that keep breaking apart and snapping back into different configurations. The painting treats modernism less as a completed promise of progress and more as a pile of futures that never fully arrived, still there to be shifted, re-sorted, and tried again.
Repetition, here, doesn’t land on certainty. It opens room. Each module works like a small engine for imagining what might have been, what could still come into view, and the odd worlds tucked inside the word maybe.
24 inches x 24 inches | Acrylic and ink on canvas
Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción 