Brandon Maldonado’s oil paintings are instantly recognizable: his portraits, images of saints and real and imagined contemporary scenes are wrought in his distinctive style that synthesizes traditional New Mexican Santero aesthetics, Cubism, outsider art, early Flemish painting and Catholic retablos and ex-votos to create paintings that are alternately haunting and humorous.
For the past few years, he has focused on work inspired by historic New Mexican Santeros. For his show at Hecho a Mano this November, he returns with an evolved visual language to the Dia de los Muertos series for which he’s best known.
His upcoming show, titled Requiem, is exactly that: a series of paintings about, and in memory of, the dead. It draws on traditional Dia de los Muertos themes and iconography, yet Maldonado brings his own lens to the celebration’s traditions. He speaks to themes of death that are culturally relevant now: paintings depicting school shootings, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the looming possibility of nuclear war. From these explorations of death on a societal scale, Maldonado also gets personal with a piece memorializing the death of his dog last year.


“So, it’s Dia de los Muertos, but not in as straightforward of a way as some might expect,”
That’s what makes the show compelling: from paintings he describes as “pure eye candy” playing with the traditional iconography of Dia de los Muertos to those grappling with social and personal tragedy, “There's fun imagery to enjoy but also sad, tragic and shameful things to explore,” Maldonado says. “Those are all aspects of talking about death—we have both joyful memories and sorrowful pains.”
Maldonado has worked primarily in oil paints for the past two decades. “In the past couple years I've gotten really excited about mark making and the different ways in which to go about making marks,” he says. This has led him to explore mixed media, using acrylics and oil together, building up impasto textures, and at times scratching at the finished surface and pulling the paint off. “It’s been fun to explore and think about surface texture in a bit of a different way than I did when I was strictly working in oil with a more classical approach,” he says.
All of his work is informed by stories and histories related to the New Mexican and Mexican identities of his ancestry, and honors the visual language of the cultural clothing and celebrations that New Mexico prides itself on keeping alive. “It's a celebration of this heritage of the people we are connected to but have been separated from by a border,” Maldonado says. “For me, it’s about cultural preservation and pride.”


His work has always been inspired by philosophical and religious themes, and he brings these motifs to this show: “Philosophy and religion are fields that are dominated by the question of death, what happens when we die, and how to live a right life—I think that crosses over rather easily into imagery about death and the mystery of it all,” Maldonado says. One theme he often returns to is the idea that “from death comes life.”
“We experience it over and over, through the course of the annual seasons to the seasons of our lives,” he says. “The dead body is ritually put into the earth with the hope that as the seed falls from the tree and becomes something new, so shall we.”