JDCACERES

JD Caceres is a Westchester-County-based Peruvian artist whose work screams with raw visual potency. Self-taught, he offers a humorous, yet authentic take on his Latin American heritage and his life as an immigrant in the United States. His latest body of work features depictions of hearts and crowns. The Heart of Love is a group of paintings portraying love’s essence through the image of the heart. Here the artist sets out to define the nature of love while emphasizing the ways in which the heart can be disregarded and forgotten. The Royal Crown series shows how emotions become entangled with thoughts, forming a disconnect between our emotions and our intellect. He says, “We are all Kings and Queens in our own world, and what better representation than a crown to depict how self-important we act?”

Using a dripping technique with acrylic and enamel paint, Caceres weaves intricate circuits that symbolize the heaviness and complexity of the human mind and psyche. The surface is clad in layers of paint, mixed with modeling paste, or paired with grotesque paper-mache characters emerging from the background. Caceres’ hearts and brains are damaged organs, hardened by a lifetime of neglect and self-abuse. Like defibrillators, his works inject powerful shock waves through our system–a last-ditch attempt toward self-awareness and love.