Since I was a teenager I have been watching humans naked — and mute, no statements, no discourse, only their actions. Not as an inability to see them any other way, but this way I feel more secure in front of a loved one rehearsing love, or in front of an adult crying with the same technical precision they use to sign documents. And given the case, in front of an artist performing emotion he stopped feeling years ago. Surely I have done all of this myself.

Beyond those possible child traumas, next to all of this, my masters are the dog that loves without rehearsal, the plant that simply responds to water, the child who hasn't yet learned that feelings can be managed — not because nature is pure and humans are corrupt, but because these are the only beings I have never caught lying to me. I keep expanding the frame because the gap keeps appearing everywhere I look  — between what is alive and what has learned to simulate being alive: machines as beings or beings as machines. This has become a chronic passion — a constructive sadness that keeps me observing and representing, that I have no interest in curing. I feel more protected by a black widow spider than by any being that has ever claimed to feel with me. It makes me sad in silence one day and furious as an artist the next. But I present it, I laugh at it, I expose it, I ironize it — I build walking architectures of it and climb inside them and find, every time, that the models are the toys enriching my artistic life. I see humans naked because finally I have hope in them. That is the only reason any of this hurts.

This is what I have prepared myself for — with sound, with drawing, with mechanical sculpture, with scores, with mark-making — whatever the gap requires. The automaton that trembles instead of performing precision. The pianist who follows his own prior failures because they are the only score he has. The crowd that copies the crowd and calls it resistance. The children who sing the national anthem with complete conviction and the tuning  never arrives. The birds that don't come back. I have been watching my entire life — including myself, which is the least comfortable part, and I have never found a reason to stop. My pieces do not represent me. I represent them. I am still not sure about the cost of that.