Puig offers oxygen to a world suffocating under the weight of habit and borrowed morals.
Mr. Puigb
American surrealist · Multidisciplinary artist · Los Angeles
Artist Statement
The world of form is disordered and silent until someone looks at it. Puig's images don't arrive with meaning attached. They are finished in the eye of the viewer, who brings their own beliefs, fears and desires to them. That is the point: his work is a mirror.
Through photography, analog film and oil painting, Puig stages scenes that displace the everyday so that what we usually hide becomes visible. Fear. Dependency. Consumption. Ageing. The masks we wear and the distractions we reach for when life gets hard. He questions the assumptions we inherit about beauty and ugliness, good and bad, life and death, and the systems that quietly decide how we should live.
Death is not a taboo in his work. It's part of the pattern. Puig sees the inevitability of death as an intrinsic part of life, and he looks for the organic patterns that bring harmony to the world, even in decay. The result is unsettling and tender at once.
He is not in the business of fabricating illusions. Through his lens, people appear as beautiful as they truly are, and the ordinary turns out to have been extraordinary all along.
Biography
Mr. Puig is an American artist based in Los Angeles. For more than two decades he has worked as a full-time photographer, creative director and producer, while building a body of personal work rooted in surrealism. He draws on the classical painters and on Spanish culture, from Cervantes' Don Quijote to , DAlí to Picasso, to flamenco, and also all the Pop Culture's of movies from the 80's and 90's.
His work moves in eras rather than a single style:
Epoca Nera: Casting Demons. The dark period. Night, makeup and fire. Facing the monsters we all carry.
Epoca Chiusa: The Quarantine. In March 2020, as the world locked its doors, Puig kept working. Over six weeks he photographed more than 160 people around the world inside their own homes, directing every image remotely through the sitter's own phone. He hosted virtual photo meets for more than 400 photographers. It became a new way of making photographs, and the proof of a conviction: art can't be locked down.
Epoca Lucida. Clarity. Single-idea images in daylight and flat colour.
Nostalgic Melancholy. The era opening now. Quieter, more poetic, more melancholic.
On limitation
Puig shoots film, and he welcomes limits. A limit forces a sharper idea. He believes artists do their best work under extreme conditions, when the usual tools are taken away and only vision is left.
On attention
You can't pursue happiness directly, and Puig believes the same is true of an audience. He doesn't chase followers. In his view, the louder something performs online, the more average it tends to be. He would rather build a small, real community than a large, distracted one. Addicted to Distractions asks the question he asks himself: what do you reach for when life gets tough?
Why he creates
For Puig, being an artist is not a career choice but a duty: not only to be inspired, but to inspire. The moment he works for is when he sees his idea reflected in someone else's eyes, and they believe it can become real.
Exhibitions · Publications · Print editions · Collaborations
hlpuig@gmail.com · @puig_photography