Borjas’s most recent work with photography permits him to encounter today’s world at its most banal and create images that transcend reality, while constantly making reference to the familiar and recognizable. In one of his most dramatic series, “Los Olvidados” (The Forgotten), his goal is to create a new history from the past by piecing together an accumulation of photos and photo fragments in compositions that are often constructed as history paintings, with figures in landscapes that succumb to the detritus of his collections. The array of objects, whole and in pieces, equate familiarity with meaninglessness and diversity, and may serve as a metaphor for the human condition, torn between the comfort of modernity and the challenge to survive amidst garbage and chaos. This constant interest in humanity, relationships, and interaction is also present throughout his career, demonstrated in a variety of media, including installations that focus on gesture and signs and their universal significance.

Such installations afford the artist a new opportunity to investigate all the complexities of humanity, psychologically and physically, while he delves into their meaning through a diversity of techniques. However, words and signs are ever-present. Signs become substitutes for reality that may be considered like threads that weave their way through his work over the years, emerge from the thick and the painterly as mere words, letters or gestures, inform the darkness and bring light out of the shadows, and keep constant the artist’s astute sense of awareness and aesthetic sensibility.

Carol Damian
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Director and Chief Curator