Paco is a Brooklyn-based artist and illustrator who began playing around with digital drawing while living for a decade in Santiago de Chile. What started out of experimentation soon became a new artistic challenge; the ease offered in the digital format was undercut by the limited nature of a screen and a fingertip to draw. It soon became his medium of choice.

His work responds to the visual culture he is surrounded by with an eye for exaggeration and distortion. Pop culture, drag queens, lights, textures… everything makes its way in. He enlarges, subtracts, and riffs on recognizable forms, hoping to communicate a sense of wonder and excitement about the way plastic and stylized references can come alive with more expressionistic and intuitive rendering. 

At Hektor, I hope to explore different methods of bringing my digital drawings into the physical world. I began drawing on a tablet out of necessity and convenience. Quickly, I became enamored with the process and the counterintuitive way the digital medium allowed me to be more expressive and gestural. 

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with rendering texture and tactile quality in my work; hard, squishy, prickly, metallic. I can’t wait to keep exploring while surrounded by a lush and diverse landscape like Lanzarote. I want to see how far I can push myself away from the convenience and immediacy of digital drawing. I’m also interested in the way my technique will have evolved after so many years rendering with my finger as opposed to a pencil or brush. 

 In many ways, I feel like the visceral quality of creating the line by smearing my finger across the screen is more personal than when I’m separated by an instrument. I want to explore all of the spaces between the digital and the physical with the goal of creating a visual language and narrative about that tension as I live it on the island.