Born in 1986 in El Paso, Texas, Zozo Garcia grew up in the friction of heat, religion, and difference. Trained in classical realism under Russian painters Alexander and Lyuba Titovets, he built a foundation that still anchors his current work. Today, Zozo paints in a language he calls queer abstraction — a collision of chaos, eroticism, and cultural memory.

 

Each painting begins with a photograph of queer male intimacy; erotic acts and gestures once hidden for survival. Zozo crops, fragments, and reimagines these references into organic forms, stripping them of literal context but retaining their tension and pulse. What remains is color, rhythm, and coded desire: the visual DNA of queer life, visible and invisible at once.

 

His process is spontaneous, guided by emotion rather than plan. Acrylic and oil pastels build dense layers of saturated and muted tones, shifting between harmony and rupture. Shapes exaggerate; colors clash; meaning flickers. The result is a field of chaos and beauty; overwhelming for some, exhilarating for others.

 

Zozo’s palette carries his Latin roots: bold and defiant. Beneath that vibrancy lies a deeper current; lingering fear, shame, and resistance forged by growing up queer in a conservative world. His work hides what history has forced to be hidden, while celebrating what refuses to die: joy, community, and the erotic as a source of power.

 

Each piece ends with his signature in pink; a deliberate contradiction. A color dismissed as feminine, queering both strength and softness. For Zozo, pink isn’t decoration; it’s a declaration.

 

His paintings don’t ask for approval.  They exist for those who’ve lived the coded lives of queer existence; complex, messy, sexual, and human. In a world still uneasy with difference, Zozo Garcia paints what’s been hidden and dares it to take up space.