We're Wild Animals
Digital painting, technique: Digital Divisionism.
A young man in a suit stands in a dense jungle, suitcase in hand. Beside him a jaguar stands in the same posture, the same stillness, looking into the camera exactly as he does. The mirroring is the structure of the piece.
The painting is built entirely from small, discrete blocks of color, a technique Guerroa is developing under the name Digital Divisionism, in the tradition of Divisionism and Pointillism but executed digitally. The man and the jaguar are constructed from the same material, the same units of color, with no hierarchy in the brushwork between them. That decision is deliberate. The painting argues against a hierarchy we have invented for ourselves, the one that places modern human life above instinct, above territory, above the animal drives that move every other species on this planet.
The suit reads as civilization. The rat race. The suitcase full of meetings and numbers and quarterly targets we have built to convince ourselves we have moved past where we came from. The jaguar is there to remind the viewer that the distance is a costume. Underneath the suit, the wiring stays the same. We compete. We posture. We protect what is ours. We move through the world the way every animal moves through the world, and the suit does not change that, it only hides it from view.
We're Wild Animals is a direct statement rather than a metaphor. The man and the jaguar are not opposites. They are the same creature, dressed differently, telling themselves different stories about what they are.
