When I later inherited a family heirloom of Venezuelan vintage Playboys as an adult, I was confronted not only with the material presence of these magazines, but with the memory of my own premature exposure to sexual imagery. As a boy, I had encountered such images before I could fully comprehend their implications, and my instinct was to intervene—scribbling new hair colors, altering backgrounds, attempting to disrupt the glossy surfaces of desire with gestures of play. With White-Out and permanent markers, I instinctively began to intervene—scribbling new hair colors, altering backgrounds, disrupting the glossy surface of desire with gestures of play. These early acts of modification became a way of reasserting agency against a visual language that overwhelmed me.
Within an art historical lineage, this work sits at the intersection of appropriation and revision. Much as artists from the Pictures Generation—such as Richard Prince or Cindy Sherman—have reconfigured the saturated codes of mass media, these interventions attempt to reframe the spectacle of sexuality as something unstable, porous, and open to reinterpretation. The scribbles are not mere vandalism, but an unconscious strategy of balance: a child’s attempt to neutralize overstimulation by remaking what was given into something more manageable, even intimate.
This body of work recognizes that premature exposure to sexual imagery has a distorting effect—it accelerates curiosity while bypassing comprehension, leaving a residue of confusion and fascination. By revisiting those images now through the lens of art, I seek to restore a measure of equilibrium. The altered magazines become both artifact and palimpsest: simultaneously testaments to the excesses of erotic spectacle and records of a young mind’s effort to reclaim its own imaginative space.
In this way, the work acknowledges the double-bind of concealment and exposure—echoing Gulliver’s dialogue with the Houyhnhnms. What is hidden, what is revealed, and why? The marks intervene in the glossy certainties of pornography, not to censor, but to complicate: to reimagine sexuality as something that can be reshaped, resisted, and ultimately reclaimed as part of a larger narrative of identity.