Vasco Del Rey was born in 1996 in Chemic, Chiapas, and is now based in Los Angeles. His work is a mythic reconstruction of memory, identity, and longing anchored in the psychological weight of the immigrant experience and animated by the surreal logic of dreams. His paintings do not offer clear answers; they are rituals, gestures of survival, scenes suspended between grief and desire.
The body is central to his work: contorted, reaching, weeping, blooming. Often faceless, his figures carry the weight of two homes, two tongues, and the emotional scar tissue of distance. Raised on a ranch in southern Mexico and living now in Los Angeles, he navigates duality through visual contradiction: sacred but sensual, raw but radiant, wounded but standing. His compositions are altars of scars where the myth of masculinity collapses while love—familial, romantic, and spiritual—bleeds through.
Del Rey's recent shift to natural pigments deepens the emotional gravity of the work and reconnects it to an ancestral and ceremonial quiet power. The use of organic color is not merely aesthetic; it is a return, a way to collapse distance.
Symbolism recurs with obsessive force. Thorns, fading fruits, flowers offered—these are not just symbols; they are emotional checkpoints for each one of us. The paintings hum with inner conflict and luminous vulnerability, reminiscent of memories we can’t name but still carry, like dreams that refuse to fade or wounds that learned how to bloom.
His experience as an immigrant isn’t a layer of the work—it is the lens through which life itself unfolds. It shapes how he moves through the world, how he remembers, how he loves. His practice lives in the tension between being asked to be visible, present, and expressive alongside the pressure to remain unseen, quiet, and cautious. This contradiction is not just emotional, but logistical and daily. The paintings don’t look back with nostalgia, nor do they seek resolution. Instead, they hold what’s complicated: the constant push to be seen while needing to stay hidden, of trauma too deep to share but too heavy to hide, the uneasy balance between breaking and becoming. Through this, he composes a personal mythology; not to explain, but to hold the things that can’t be fully said.