Luis Aguilera (Salvadoran, b. 1973)

Luis Aguilera was born in 1973 in San Salvador, El Salvador. In 1997 he began attending Creative Growth, an art center for artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities in Oakland, California. Exhibited nationally and internationally, his works, commonly energetic and bright, evince an eclectic mélange of people, celebrities, and animals from the abstract to the fantastic. His figures are rooted in place, stiff and at times tense; they bleed into the background of colored formations and float. It’s in these moments they appear to have lost themselves or at least their bodies, and the subsequent tension consumes Aguilera’s drawn layers of crayon. His preferred medium of wax, heavily applied, textures the works, refusing to let the colors neatly blend.