NEOTENE is a studio practice. The work is about one thing: the beautiful stuff nobody looks at.
Not landscapes. Not sunsets. The parts of the natural world that are genuinely, absurdly beautiful up close and that almost nobody has ever actually looked at — the gills of a salamander, the folds inside a cell, the glass shell of an alga you need a microscope to see. Go close enough to any of it and it stops being biology and starts being architecture.
Every series takes one organism, or one structure, and gets close enough that you lose track of what you're looking at. The pictures are abstract because the subject is abstract at that magnification. Nothing is invented. It's just nearer than you'd normally get.
Why the name
Neoteny is the retention of juvenile features into adulthood — the refusal to finish growing up. Its most complete example is the axolotl, a salamander that reaches adulthood without ever leaving its larval body. It keeps the gills. It stays in the water. It could change and it doesn't.
The axolotl takes its own name from Xolotl, the Aztec god who changed shape to escape being sacrificed — into maize, then maguey, then a salamander hiding in the canals of Xochimilco. He was found anyway. The animal carries the god's name; the studio took the habit of not being seen.
How the work is made
Images are developed digitally and produced as large-format archival pigment prints in editions of twenty-five. They are not paintings and they are not sold as paintings.
They are also not signed. Each one is numbered, comes with a certificate of authenticity, and is entered in a public register on this site that shows where every piece in the edition is in the world. A signature is a mark on paper. A register is something you can actually check.
The studio does not exhibit under a legal name and does not appear in photographs.