Felipe Baeza's work unfolds like a palimpsest, layers of pigment and printmaking techniques forming spectral images that seem to breathe, fracture, and reconstruct themselves in real time. His practice is rooted in drawing and printmaking—not simply as artistic techniques but as tools for exploring identity, migration, memory, and transformation. His works are not static images but ongoing acts of becoming, visual manifestations of fluidity, movement, and the unseen. Paper serves as both a surface and a metaphor, its fragility mirroring the precarious states of the figures he conjures: bodies in transition, dissolving and reforming, resisting fixed definitions.
Although printmaking is traditionally associated with replication, Baeza subverts this expectation, using the medium to embrace change rather than uniformity. His prints do not seek the crisp perfection of an editioned work; instead, they celebrate erosion, layering, and the organic unpredictabilities of the process. Techniques such as monoprinting, photolithography, screenprinting, and pochoir allow him to saturate paper with pigment, making it an active participant in the work rather than a passive background. As a result, his compositions vibrate with a haunting presence—figures that hover between visibility and disappearance, escaping rigid constructs of nationality, gender, and historical memory.
Baeza’s approach to drawing reinforces this sense of constant transformation. Unlike painting, which often establishes form through density and opacity, drawing invites revision, fluidity, and erasure. His lines—both delicate and assertive—sketch the outlines of bodies that seem to exist in an in-between space, neither entirely present nor fully absent. Through this process, drawing becomes an act of reinvention, a way to summon memory, challenge fixed narratives, and propose new possibilities for identity. The figures in his work often appear fragmented or hybridized, as if caught in the process of evolving from one state to another. This sense of flux echoes the experiences of those who live in liminal spaces—migrants, queer individuals, and those whose identities do not fit within rigid societal frameworks. The layering, scraping, and collaging in his compositions reflect the diasporic experience itself—a continual reconstruction of self, memory, and belonging.
His work draws upon diverse artistic lineages, recalling the distressed surfaces of Leon Golub, who depicted histories of violence and resilience, and the fragmented, poetic language of Nancy Spero, who used repetition to challenge dominant narratives. Yet Baeza operates in a space that merges history with mythology, pulling from pre-Columbian and Catholic iconographies while simultaneously dismantling them. His figures undergo metamorphoses, transforming into plant-like tendrils or dissolving into pure pigment. Gold leaf and jewel-toned washes lend his work an almost sacred quality, but these are not triumphant deities—they are fugitive spirits, exiles from systems that seek to classify and control them.
At the core of his practice, printmaking emerges as a site of resistance. Historically, prints have been a tool of the marginalized—used for political broadsheets, underground publications, and revolutionary pamphlets that challenge dominant power structures. Baeza engages with this legacy, not to mass-produce, but to disrupt and deconstruct. His monoprints reject the idea of a singular "original," embracing chance, accident, and material presence. Pigments bleed unpredictably, edges remain raw, and surfaces bear the traces of their own making, echoing the instability of memory and identity—both of which are never fully fixed and never entirely erased.
Felipe Baeza. Beyond the Vessel , 2024. Watercolor monoprint, photolitho, screenprint, pochoir, and collage on paper, 16 x 12 in (40.6 x 30.5 cm). Image courtest of the artist and Zeit Contemporary Art, New York.
This tension between presence and disappearance is particularly vivid in works like Beyond the Vessel (2024), where layers of printmaking techniques create figures that seem to flicker between worlds. Deep violet washes, fine incisions that reveal underlying layers, and red filaments that pulse from within the body all contribute to a sense of metamorphosis. His surfaces feel tactile, almost skin-like—marked, sutured, and wounded, evoking histories of migration, exile, and survival.
Ultimately, Baeza’s drawings and prints act as a form of inscription, marking presence where erasure looms. His works hold the weight of displacement and resilience, challenging narratives that seek to confine identity within strict boundaries. Paper, in his hands, is not just a medium but a battleground for memory, transformation, and survival. Through his exploration of the ephemeral and the unfinished, Baeza does not seek to define identity but to expand it—making space for fluidity, multiplicity, and reinvention. His art, always in motion, resists stasis and offers a vision of creativity as a force that breathes, shifts, and endures.
