Miami Series (2019)

In the Miami Series, Arango transforms the Miami coast into a vibrant, lived landscape. Drawing from ritual thirty-mile bike rides along the Atlantic, he captures the shifting skies, birds, and native sea grape trees, creating scenes that are at once sensorial and charged with memory. Miami emerges as both a youthful paradise and a space of religious reflection, where desire, devotion, and the remnants of his Catholic upbringing coexist in tension.

The series explores these dualities through vivid color and immersive composition. In paintings such as Us, Arango exaggerates and disrupts the pastoral imagery associated with paradise, reimagining sacred iconography through a tropical lens. Here, the landscape becomes a site of both personal pleasure and spiritual reckoning—a tropical Last Supper in which the sacred and the sensual converge.

Bodily forms and the digestive system have long been a recurring motif in Arango’s work. In Tropical, these forms merge with landscape to reference the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist, when, according to the New Testament, Jesus offered bread and wine to his disciples during the Passover meal. Through these connections, Arango entwines consumption, desire, and ritual, transforming personal experience and religious memory into a vibrant, corporeal meditation on faith, pleasure, and visibility.