Anderson Asteclines paintings revolve around numerous moments in his life; from his mother, to illness, to childhood to cruising, intimacy and vulnerability coexist with uncertainty, fear, and the possibility of pleasure. In the darkness of cruising, people can appear simultaneously as threats, strangers, or potential sources of connection; the ambiguity of such queer encounters becomes a psychological space that Asteclines repeatedly returns to in his work. One of the artist’s key influences is Edvard Munch, but his interest also extends into the psychological confinement of paintings by Francis Bacon, James Ensor’s macabre groups and the distorted architecture of German Expressionism, that offer a way of moving away from reality toward mystery.

Rooms tilt, figures become anatomically unfamiliar, and compositions gather, split and transform. Different versions and ages of his mother can occupy the same image; remembered people can merge with imagined ones; spaces can become distorted, unfamiliar, or impossible. For Asteclines, memory belongs to the present and even to the future rather than simply to the past: every return to it creates something new. Painting consequently becomes a form of time travel or a portal through which different moments, realities, and psychological states can coexist. A bed can become a site of sickness and recovery, but also a passage into another world or state. A window can suggest movement between realms. For the artist, the image is something that happens on the canvas: figures are added and removed, unexpected apparitions emerge, and the meaning of an image develops through the process of making it. This gives the work an unresolved quality, occupying a space between tenderness and menace, intimacy and distance, pleasure and fear.