BIGOTES

painting series on the archive of Rufino Pineda Paz

Bigotes is a series of 16 paintings that emerged from an exploration of the personal archive of my grandfather, Don Rufino Pineda Paz, who for decades photographed the public works he helped build—primarily roads and infrastructure—leaving behind an intimate record of a Mexico under construction. In this work, the images are transformed into painterly gestures through an exercise in memory, fictionalization, and simulation.

His personal recollections reveal not only nostalgia for my country of origin but also the development projects of a growing Latin American nation—with the consequent destruction of nature in the name of supposed progress—and the region's extractivist logics.

The photographs invite us to consider infrastructure beyond the material, viewing it instead as a web of relationships, memories, and lives.