Pope Painting

Born into a princely family, that fled from revoltion, Agustus was separated at infancy from them, and found himself growing up in an orphanage outside of Baton Rouge, Louisana. As a small child, inspired by a Cuban legend about a small man who lived in the dark waters of the village of Batey on the rivers, in reality what could bring that story to the popular imagination is that the marginalized people were not extinct in its entirety the knowledge they had of how to fish and marry. Years later, skeletons of very short people were found. They were not registered as normal inhabitants, but as an indigenous settlement in the Batey area. I remember that as a child, playing in the streams near the orphanage, when the rising of the estuary that fed, what we called, the hope river in touched the highest parts of the banks, we discovered a clay pot that we played with until they broke, they also told us about the owner of the water who lived in a deep and dark pool as soon as the sun shone the jucaro trees’ leaves did not let the light penetrate through to the waters. Our elders told us when we were back at the orphanage not to go fishing or hunting near the streams. They said they shouldn't let us fish there or the pool owner of the water will come out and catch them, one day we forgot what they always repeated to us. Imagine what we were given was such a scare that we lost everything we had in our hands. As time passed we were given a house in the countryside. My cousins ​​told me that the owner of the water was two Amazon pink dolphins, and we later see how it changes all the perspectives of something that does not clearly bring fear into your life. “When we look at the work of an artist, we often wonder about the inspirations that cause the creation of a piece of museum quality art work. As a child, Agustus was drugged and sex trafficked for several years, to Thailand by the elders at the orphanage, along with others. Later, as an adult, he struggled with disassociative disorder. In the fall of 2021, he was arrested for lighting a cigarette in the flight terminal at JFK airport and instutionalized for several weeks. Vase of Plastic Flowers, 2022, for example, was painted recalling colors of the hospital walls and rooms in the institution, and memorializes the artists perspective on mental health treatment and social platitudes and constructs of artifice in the social order.” Mesh Kaneebab, Phd student, Fordham U.