Ivan

Barrera

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Ivan Barrera

Ivan Barrera makes collages that withhold as much as they show: colored circles cover faces, single words name what the image won't, found bodies sit in compositions of stillness. Working in a Baldessari-esque style, he reassembles clippings and found symbols to pull questions of identity, queerness, and the male body out of their fixed frames. The erotic charge is deliberate — a body returned to tenderness, felt rather than consumed.
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In the Words of the Artist

Collage is one of my central languages. Through it, I learn to look at the world in fragments, and it is precisely within those fragments that the experience of inhabiting it takes shape. Clippings, found images, collective symbols torn from their original context: with these, I articulate compositions that examine narratives of identity, accelerated time, and an inevitable sense of nostalgia.

The erotic in my work is deeply personal — a sublimation of my own experience of intimacy and connection. And perhaps it is also a response to the constant exploitation of sex and bodies in advertising and media. When desire is used to sell, tenderness disappears. I'm interested in recovering that — in showing the male form as something felt rather than consumed.

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Collage, to me, is a way of seeing — and of constructing — reality. Human experience itself is made of fragments: some hidden, some overexposed, all of them shaping who we are or revealing what we're still trying to understand about ourselves. In that sense, collage is a metaphor for the experience of building oneself. We are never a finished image. We are always in the process of being assembled.

There is a tension in my work in the questioning of hegemonic values and fixed notions of identity — what gets imposed, what gets accepted without question. And alongside that, a persistent interest in absence: what is hidden, what is left out, what the image deliberately withholds. I find that the things not shown often carry as much meaning as the things that are.

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Living outside the norm — or simply lacking the privileges that come with it — gives you the ability to observe and experience the world from other vantage points. It forces you to imagine, to create the things that make resistance and existence possible. In that sense, my identity hasn't just shaped what I allow myself to make. It has made making necessary.

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I wouldn't claim to carry the weight of deconstructing masculinity — that feels too large a task for any single body of work. But I do hope mine creates space for questioning. At the very least, I want the male form in my work to be felt rather than consumed — which in itself is already a small act of resistance against the versions of masculinity we're handed.

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About the Artist

Iván Barrera is a visual artist whose practice encompasses collage, painting, and drawing techniques through which he interweaves urban aesthetics, pop nostalgia, queer experience, and an intimate eroticism. With a background in visual communication and experience in editorial design and fashion, Barrera has developed a self-taught approach to the plastic arts.

Collage stands as a central axis of his production: it operates as a metaphor for constructed identities, questioning fixed conceptions of Mexicanidad and addressing themes of masculinity, the body, and representation through a queer lens. His work proposes alternative readings of Mexican identity, queerness, and other hegemonic values imposed within a context of ongoing cultural transformation.

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