Oil on canvas, each panel 20" x 24"
Painted during my time in Texas, this modern triptych reinterprets La Santa Muerte through vibrant color, layered symbolism, and everyday objects. Each piece stands alone yet connects visually and thematically: mirroring the complex relationship between reverence, mortality, and ritual. Together, the three panels form a personal altar: an offering to transformation, memory, and the quiet power of devotion in daily life.
La Santa Muerte Triptych, Panel II
Oil on canvas, 20" x 24"
This central panel expands the devotional atmosphere of the triptych with a dense arrangement of glass vessels: a soda bottle, perfume, oil, and a pink La Santa Muerte candle. Each one is a charged object in the altar of the everyday. A pair of sunglasses lies fragmented across the surface and visually broken by the frame of the panel. Glasses, tools for seeing, become symbols of partial clarity: darkened lenses under a punishing sun, shielding yet distorting, suggesting that even light (often tied to growth and healing) can wound.A prescription pill bottle adds a contemporary relic. It offers a promise of healing, but also echoing the ambiguity of the knife in Panel I: medicine or poison, depending on intent and context. The candle, with its delicate pink wax, flickers symbolically... Life’s flame actively burning down, yet paradoxically captured in stillness. Its hue evokes the softness of devotion but also carries a cultural echo of breast cancer awareness, tying feminine resilience to vulnerability, proactivity, and mortality.
The interplay of soft pinks and sharp greens continues the triptych’s visual dualism, placing tenderness beside danger, the sacred beside the disposable. Painted during my time in Texas, this piece is both shrine and question: what do we keep sacred, and what do we consume?