Omar Asprilla

Lives and works in Dallas, TX

Artist statement

For more than forty years I have been investigating a single question — not how to make paintings, but how we learn to see. I begin each painting with intention: decisions about scale, proportion, color, and surface. I build the surface in layers and set the tension that will fracture it. But I do not decide the fissure. Gravity, moisture, pigment, and time become active participants. The first cracks open about fourteen hours later, so I leave the studio at night and return to something I did not choose. Then I go on painting into what has opened, and a color buried under later layers comes back up through the crack. In forty years no two have cracked alike. I have learned to work with these forces rather than eliminate them. Each painting becomes an investigation rather than the execution of a predetermined image. The purpose of painting is not to confirm what I already know but to discover what I could not have known before I started. As an Afro-Colombian American artist, my life has been shaped by migration, history, memory, and inheritance. I do not paint to illustrate autobiography. I hope instead that the paintings ask how uncertainty becomes form.

Artwork

• Global Warming #2, 2025. Mixed media on canvas
• Presence, 2025. Mixed media on canvas
• The Absent Circumference , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• Geometry Of Quiet, 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• Silent Synthesis , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• The Geometry of Absence , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• The Architecture of Fracture , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• Axis of Contingency , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• Coordinates of the Invisible , 2026. Mixed media on canvas
• Between Forces , 2026. Mixed media on canvas