Kill Mature
Carlos Etcheverry
Poster Design by: Kesler Lilly
Carlos Etcheverry, a.k.a Oripoto, works through drawing, print, installation, music, comics, and performance to examine how stories survive authoritarianism, migration, and everyday absurdity. His practice is anchored in the aesthetics of underground comix, the self-taught DIY spirit of zine culture, and the music that shapes his studio days. The work is sharp, funny, and abrasive when it needs to be, and never neutral.
Etcheverry communicates most clearly through making. Drawing and printing remain the ways he understands the world. He adds humor, beauty, or a bit of wicked wonder back to it. Even when he approaches darker themes, his aim is to offer viewers a moment of recognition, a smile, or a crack in the façade of power.
Born in Venezuela and working in Los Angeles and Wilmington, Etcheverry carries a lived memory of a political landscape shaped by censorship and contradiction. Caracas appears in the exhibition through a papier-mâché sculpture of the mountains of Oripoto dressed with an illuminated cross. The mountain is a stand-in for the place that shaped him, while the symbols of his Catholic childhood surface as icons to be reinterpreted, mocked, or dismantled. Humor becomes the tool through which harm, hypocrisy, and the absurdity of power are exposed.
His imagery moves between the ordinary and the surreal: ordinary moments rendered with documentary bluntness, followed by impossible creatures, strange architectures, or visions pulled from dreams, comics and counterculture. Etcheverry believes that illustration should be lived with, shared, worn, and recognized as a vital artform that can archive personal experience.
Borlo, Etcheverry’s long-running comic and performance alter ego, sits at the center of his practice. Borlo functions as a trickster, witness, and sometimes stand-in for the artist himself. Through Borlo, Etcheverry moves between autobiography, satire and collective memory. This trajectory continues in his nonfiction comics, including the forthcoming El Horror Es Su Divisa and El Día Que Me Pilló Mi Abuela Con la Burra de mi Tío, which extend his interest in how personal narratives intersect with political history.
Across mediums, his work is critical, restless and deliberately rough around the edges. It refuses the expectation that political art must be sober or tidy. Instead, it embraces the messy, layered, and sometimes overwhelming qualities of lived experience. His influences of Reveróns madness, Goya’s darkness, Crumb’s freedom, Druillet’s scale, Liberatore’s danger, Bakshi’s irreverence, run through the work like a charge. There is always music in the studio: analog post-punk, ‘70’s strangeness, early ‘90s psychedelia. His mixtapes are an extension of the work itself: mood, memory, and critique arranged as sound. His style shifts as his playlists do; never fixed, always evolving.
Artmaking, for Etcheverry, is not just expression. It is resistance.
Etcheverry communicates most clearly through making. Drawing and printing remain the ways he understands the world. He adds humor, beauty, or a bit of wicked wonder back to it. Even when he approaches darker themes, his aim is to offer viewers a moment of recognition, a smile, or a crack in the façade of power.
Born in Venezuela and working in Los Angeles and Wilmington, Etcheverry carries a lived memory of a political landscape shaped by censorship and contradiction. Caracas appears in the exhibition through a papier-mâché sculpture of the mountains of Oripoto dressed with an illuminated cross. The mountain is a stand-in for the place that shaped him, while the symbols of his Catholic childhood surface as icons to be reinterpreted, mocked, or dismantled. Humor becomes the tool through which harm, hypocrisy, and the absurdity of power are exposed.
His imagery moves between the ordinary and the surreal: ordinary moments rendered with documentary bluntness, followed by impossible creatures, strange architectures, or visions pulled from dreams, comics and counterculture. Etcheverry believes that illustration should be lived with, shared, worn, and recognized as a vital artform that can archive personal experience.
Borlo, Etcheverry’s long-running comic and performance alter ego, sits at the center of his practice. Borlo functions as a trickster, witness, and sometimes stand-in for the artist himself. Through Borlo, Etcheverry moves between autobiography, satire and collective memory. This trajectory continues in his nonfiction comics, including the forthcoming El Horror Es Su Divisa and El Día Que Me Pilló Mi Abuela Con la Burra de mi Tío, which extend his interest in how personal narratives intersect with political history.
Across mediums, his work is critical, restless and deliberately rough around the edges. It refuses the expectation that political art must be sober or tidy. Instead, it embraces the messy, layered, and sometimes overwhelming qualities of lived experience. His influences of Reveróns madness, Goya’s darkness, Crumb’s freedom, Druillet’s scale, Liberatore’s danger, Bakshi’s irreverence, run through the work like a charge. There is always music in the studio: analog post-punk, ‘70’s strangeness, early ‘90s psychedelia. His mixtapes are an extension of the work itself: mood, memory, and critique arranged as sound. His style shifts as his playlists do; never fixed, always evolving.
Artmaking, for Etcheverry, is not just expression. It is resistance.
