Artist Statement
My work stems from a motivation and natural curiosity in finding meaning and connections between things that some might find meaningless and unrelated. I see patterns from randomness similarly to the perception of pareidolia where one sees familiarity from marks and objects. Through painting, drawing, photography and digital experimentation I discover form out of a body of noise and carve out figures and faces out of the obscure. It is this act of creating (and sometimes destroying) that allows for uncovering something unique. These experiments are attempts at capturing something that feels as if they manifested from memory. In order to arrive at this I move fast and use spontaneous movements that attack the surface. Nothing is preplanned. I use a combination of found and traditional tools to achieve this effect. I prefer discarded broken things varying between sharp and dull edges made out of rubber, metal and plastic. The idea is to uncover something new between the balance of transparent and opaque layers that have been manipulated over several sessions until the process has reached culmination. The cataloging of this process began over a decade earlier with countless experiments amounting to over four thousand abstract studies. It is the curiosity that drives this determination to find a cohesion between form and ambiguity.
Dualism
Experimentation has been essential in my artistic growth. I like to move from familiar representational shapes to abstracted elements in a play that both draw the viewer in while trying to achieve an emotional resonance that ties the work together. This duality creates variation that is not simply an esthetic choice, but works at giving the viewer a plethora of visual cues expressing seemingly infinite responses.
Biography
Luis Diaz was born in Cardenas, Cuba. His family migrated to the States in 1982 and established themselves in Coral Gables, FL where at a young age discovered drawing. In school his design became the inspiration for the logo of the U.S.S. Miami, a nuclear submarine that had been built for the U.S. Navy. He would go on to attend an art magnet high school and then major in Illustration at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. Diaz has worked as an illustrator and designer for television, product, print and interactive media for over 25 years. He currently works in his home studio near Springfield, IL.
