I put on his mask before I knew a thing about him. DYBBUK MASQUE LXXXIII was the first artwork I ever rotated in as a profile picture, and I said at the time that it kind of looks like me. It felt right in a way I could not explain yet.

Then I found out where Andres comes from, and it clicked.

He was born in Caracas, out of a background he describes as Jewish-Italian, Romanian, and Venezuelan all at once. Art found him at fourteen; the real path opened at nineteen, when he committed to Hermetic magick and an hour of meditation a day. And he learned to paint the way almost no one bothers to anymore: he apprenticed with art forgers in Florence, on purpose, to burn Renaissance technique so deep into his hands that it became reflex. Then he flew to Peru, drank Ayahuasca, and let the painting and the ritual and the history fuse into one thing. It pours now into SHEOL, an ongoing painted underworld he says he has actually walked through, where he works out his obsessions with the erotic and with death.

So he is not a guy who made a striking mask. He is a painter trained like a Renaissance forger who paints like he is drawing a map of hell.

New York

Then I met him. Not on a screen, in New York, in the flesh, and we did the most natural thing two people who love painting can do in that city: we went to the Met and stood in front of the American wing for an afternoon. I will not forget watching a man who trained on European forgery look hard at American painting, Sargent and Homer and the rest, reading the brushwork like a language he happens to speak. The collection had put a token in my wallet. The token put a friend on the bench next to me.

I wear his mask because I like moving through this space a little masked, watching more than watched. It turns out the man behind it earned every thread of it, in Florence and Peru and, one good afternoon, at the Met.