Technology has ascended to a position of divine reverence. Artificial intelligence and social media now shape our identities, beliefs, and desires the way gods and saints once did, and we consult them with the same daily devotion. Twenty years after my MFA thesis ICONsumer, which examined consumer culture as a belief system, this exhibition follows that inquiry into its next stage: from the religion of the market to a theology of technology. The deities of antiquity were worshipped for their power over nature and fate. Their successors are the algorithms that preside over what we see, what we want, and what we believe.

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The paintings here are executed in oil and gold leaf on retablo panels and triptychs. The retablo arrived in the Americas as many things at once: a portable altar, a craft passed down through workshops, an intimate object of household devotion, and an instrument of conversion. I use all of it. Drawing on mythology, Christian iconography, and the archetypes of the Tarot, these panels are populated by Madonnas, muses and sirens, saints, sinners and monsters, along with allegories and occult symbols borrowed from alchemy and astrology. The old sacred figures return bearing new attributes. Nothing is erased. One belief system overwrites another and both remain visible, the way colonial saints were painted over older gods. These are anachronistic stages where past and present empires meet. So I built a pantheon. Old forms carry new gods.

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What interests me is less the technology than what it reveals about us. I grew up in Puerto Rico as mass media, advertising, and video games were colonizing the imagination of my generation, and I have watched those same forces, refined and accelerated, come to mediate how we think, relate, and remember. We rarely pause to examine any of this amid the constant noise and distraction. Technology is a double-edged sword, and everything depends on the hands that wield it and the systems that direct it. I am skeptical of blind faith in the machine and equally skeptical of easy rejection. The question these paintings ask is older than any device: are we passive consumers of beliefs manufactured for us, or can we still choose what we worship? Just as the ancients sought guidance from their gods, we must learn to discern the wisdom and the warnings hidden within the new ones we have made. I keep painting  slowly by hand in an age of AI and algorithms, out of remembrance, contemplation, and resistance.