NEOTENE is a pseudonymous artist. Born and raised in Miami; the studio works between Miami and Mexico City.
Two cities of water, both running out of it — one drying from below, one drowning from above. And one of them is a city that has organised its entire economy around never getting older.
Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood — the failure, or the refusal, to finish growing up. Its most complete example is the axolotl, a salamander that reaches sexual maturity without ever leaving its larval body. It breeds as a child and stays that way until it dies.
That animal is the artist's only subject. It regenerates — limbs, spinal cord, heart tissue, portions of its brain — and does so without scarring. And it is critically endangered, with as few as fifty individuals left in the wild water it is endemic to, while millions are bred in tanks and laboratories around the world.
NEOTENE treats these as facts about a generation, not a salamander. The work returns again and again to arrested development, to bodies that come apart and grow back, and to the specific comedy of being beloved and endangered at the same time.
The paintings are flat. Colour is laid in unmodulated planes with a hard contour and no visible brushwork, at a scale that asks to be read from a distance. The figure is almost never shown whole — the canvas holds a hand, a gill fan, a mouth, cropped past the point of legibility until the cartoon becomes an abstraction.
The axolotl takes its own name from Xolotl, the Aztec god of fire and lightning who, faced with sacrifice, changed his shape to escape it — becoming maize, then maguey, then a salamander that hid in the canals of Xochimilco. He was found anyway and condemned to stay there. The animal carries the god's name. The artist has taken the condition instead.
The studio conceives its images digitally and executes them in oil on canvas. NEOTENE does not exhibit under a legal name and does not appear in photographs.