A retablo is a place enclosing revered objects as an altar. The word retablo carries with it centuries of devotional history: small altar-like structures used to house images, prayers, petitions, and acts of offering. I did not arrive at this form through religious nostalgia. I arrived through a need for boundary. After years of working inside networks, systems, flows, and chaos-driven emergence, I felt a pull toward containment, not as control, but as threshold. The Retablos arise from this need to hold something without returning it to stasis.
They are not restorations of tradition. They are transpositions.
As a child I was exposed to the displaying of personal altars of worship in many homes that I visited. For me it was a normal part of life to see these niches of importance and reverence. These altars housed images of loved ones as well as objects of sentimental value as a respectful offering.
As an adult, I realized that beyond my Hispanic American culture, there are many iterations of this practice across many other cultures as well, in one form or another.
I create retablos as an appropriation of this personal practice for ideas or sentiments that are valuable to me as a human being, woman, mother, child, wife, artist, and healer.
Threshold Objects, and the Architecture of Language as Devotion
The Retablos emerge in my practice as objects of passage. They are neither simply paintings nor simply constructions, neither wholly private nor fully public, neither entirely secular nor overtly sacred. They occupy a hinge space, materially, conceptually, and spiritually. If NeuroMorphic Universe dissolves the object into circulating systems of intelligence, Retablos reintroduce the object as a site of containment, devotion, and encounter. The work shifts from distributed field to intimate architecture.
The Return of the Object as Sacred Container
Unlike earlier works where objects dissolved into systems or functioned as archives of daily life, the Retablos insist on being objects. They assert their edges. They have language to say something important. They invite approach. They establish a front and an interior. They reintroduce architecture at the scale of the hand and the body.
This return to containment is not a retreat from complexity. It is a recalibration of scale. After moving through distributed intelligence, I discovered the necessity for focused meaning. The Retablos create rooms for attention.
They are built, not merely painted. Words matter. Depth matters. The act of opening matters. Time becomes spatialized. Encounter becomes durational.
The viewer no longer only looks. The viewer approaches, leans in, crosses a threshold.
