Malign Influences

Diego MORENO

The Mexican artist Diego Moreno processes the very personal experiences he made growing up in a deeply religious environment that he felt he did not belong to. Moreno, who already realised that he was homosexual at a young age, believed that this was incompatible with the values that his family, his school, and the Catholic Church had taught him as being “right”. In Malign Influences, he imagines an alternative reality of monstrous beings. He manipulates images from his own family’s archive, paints over the faces of the people shown, and replaces some of them with diabolical grimaces. With these demonic creatures, he created allies with whom – on account of his long-perceived rejection – he could better identify than with the people portrayed. In his work In My Mind There Is Never Silence, he also deals with questions of guilt and marginalisation by making the expansive and terrifying figures of “Los Panzudos”, who symbolise sinfulness in his home region, appear in everyday life.