I am a born-and raised Mexico City Painter.
I apprenticed the infamous painter + sculptor, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, in La Roma from 2000-2005.
I washed his brushes, absorbed his magic and was a supplementary teacher in his school.
After the joy and madness in Navarro’s workshop, I painted cookies in a bakery for a living as I wound through the existential confusion of youth.
At the bakery, I met a Spanish Count who found me 10 years of work painting weddings.
My favorite guest was the bull dog, of course.
Then I found myself contracted for Hotel Desire Cancun, live painting copulating couples in their sensuous acts.
Little by little I began to throw globs of freedom into this era of realism.
Then came El Quinto Piso, a clandestine collective in an abandoned parking garage.
It was like a painters’ play ground. We had expositions and live painting sessions, all punk.
I began to interrupt my own realism.
Ducks and monsters and globs of paint and dreams over unusable commissioned weddings and dinner parties.
Joshijo Shijo is born, my abstract alias.
(A name my grandfather gave me as a young boy)
