Dan Montavaro

I grew up watching the walls move. In the South Bronx during the 1980s, the city was a canvas in motion, subway cars, building facades, the street itself, and what I understood before I had language for it was that art could live anywhere, could speak to anyone, could hold more than one thing at once.

That tension is still the engine. My paintings are built to carry contradiction: the human and the animal, the sacred and the street, ceremony and concealment. When two opposing images meet on a surface, they don’t cancel each other out, they make a third thing, a conversation that neither image could have alone. That’s what I’m looking for every time I work.

The Masks series came out of a long preoccupation with identity and the theater of it, what we put on, what transforms us, what we refuse to show. These aren’t portraits of hiding. A child behind a golden mask wreathed in vines isn’t hidden; something is being held. A woman in a red jacket whose gaze won’t meet yours is protecting something worth protecting. The figures in my work are suspended between states, and I think that suspension is honest. Most of us live there.

Chimera and botánica asked different questions, what does survival look like when it borrows from multiple traditions at once? The botánica has always been a place where Latinx and Afro-Caribbean spiritual life could exist without apology, where the practical and the devotional share a shelf. I’m interested in that same simultaneity on canvas.

Motion, and the suggestion of motion, have always come first. I want the work to feel like it was caught mid-thought, like something could shift the moment you turn away. The street taught me that: you don’t get to hold attention by standing still.