It is born from a sentence that should never exist, yet was spoken anyway: a parent claiming they would rather have a dead son than an autistic one.
The face is not a portrait. It is aftermath. Identity pressed, scraped, and rewritten until only residue remains. An orange skeletal presence burns through the surface like something refusing erasure, even while swallowed by suffocating black. The eyes are hollow in shape but not in meaning, holding galaxies that feel less like wonder and more like exhaustion made visible.
Across the mouth, language collapses. Words attempt to form and fail mid-birth, dissolving into distortion and drip. Communication becomes unstable, punished before it can fully arrive. A streak of gold cuts through it all like an imposed narrative, “hijo muerto” bleeding into the canvas as both label and wound.This piece lives in the threshold between being alive and being erased.
It asks what it means to exist when your existence is treated as an error in someone else’s story.
“Hijo Muerto / Dead Son” is not about death.
It is about being told you should have never been alive in the first place.