HERBERT DE PAZ

    My painting is a space where I have chosen to delve into my own memories. Faced with the asphalt of the mega-highways that now cover the paths of my childhood and alter the horizon, my work emerges as a patchwork quilt made of absences and affections. I paint to weave together, on a single poetic surface, the myths I’ve inherited, the stories I’ve lived, and the silent daily life I observe around me.

I seek to convey the weight of time through the light of day: the dawn’s brightness that reveals the volcano and the falling of night that brings the scent of fried bananas—an aroma that for me has always been synonymous with a roof over my head, dinner, and shelter. On my canvases, the ancient carved artifacts of Cotzumalhuapa share the space with the mystical memory of my grandfather Elías’s milpa, where harvesting corn by his side was like taking a journey through time. I extend these landscapes to the rain-soaked hills of the Pacific and the beaches of my youth—places I try to imagine in their original purity.

Through the cracks in this earth, I invoke creatures like the pig snake, the Kuyankuat, bringing it forth in its childlike form as a comfort, a desire to restore the flow of the waters of our imagination. I know that the ground I walk on bears the marks of difficult years, of guarded silences, and of gray times that have changed the way we walk. But the gaze of the zanate bird, which accompanies me and knows what I feel, brings me back to the simplicity of the present moment. Ultimately, what I seek through my art is to celebrate the ancestral heritage contained in the simple act of being able to eat a tortilla the next day, knowing that, after all the harvests and journeys, the earth will always be our final destination.