Esteban Barrón’s painting changed over time. He moved from bouquets of flowers and warm landscapes to geometric forms influenced by architecture. Then came another language: pain. A language built from a loss that forced him to rethink not only his work, but also the meaning of making art.
Esteban’s canvases became filled with skulls, entrails and fragmented bodies.
“What I was doing was a representation of pain, horror, shock, sadness and helplessness,” the binational artist says in Spanish. Esteban divides his life between México and Arizona.
He found in painting a way to name what he could not express any other way. In February of last year, a relative he considered a younger brother died. Members of organized crime tried to forcibly recruit him. He says that when he refused, they killed him in front of his friends on a street in Colonia Nueva de Guantes, a community in Valle de Santiago, Guanajuato, a town of fewer than 500 residents.
“I have to put it this way,” Esteban says. “It’s an endless source of pain. The only thing you can do is try to minimize it.”
There is silence.
“Give me a second,” Esteban says.
A few moments pass before he speaks again.
“You think time is going to heal. But the days go by. The months go by. The pain is still the same as it was on the first day.”
His voice cracks.
“It shook all of us tremendously, especially me,” he says.
Esteban is about to turn 40. He was in Arizona when he heard what happened. He spent weeks seeking sanity.
“I spent that month almost in limbo, trying to understand what was happening. I wanted to come back and scream at the system, at people, at those who are spreading harm. I wanted them to stop. To stop doing this. To stop committing so much brutality.”
Esteban soon realized that doing so also carried a risk. Speaking out could make him a target for organized crime.
He returned to painting.
“Once again, I realized that the only tool I had to raise my voice, even if only quietly, was art,” he says in a calm, steady voice, speaking without haste.
That is how Estaban’s two most recent exhibitions came to life: Collided Emotions 2025 and Curated Experience 2026.
Collided Emotions
Esteban came to the United States from México as a child. In Arizona, he found an art classroom and a teacher who saw talent where he only saw a crumpled drawing. Soon afterward, he struggled to adapt to a school where he knew no one.
Art became his refuge.
He spent hours at school creating. Esteban found his place. He won competitions and graduated from high school recognized by both teachers and classmates.
He studied architecture at Arizona State University, convinced it offered greater stability.
He never stopped painting.
After graduating, he worked as an architect. Esteban says the work environment ultimately pushed him away. He resigned and returned to the canvas as a way of life.
For a time, his work was defined by geometry, lines and colors inspired by architecture.
“I enjoyed it very much, but I felt it lacked a cause, a purpose,” he says.
Esteban realized art can become a vehicle for speaking about injustice, but above all about emotions: “those we cannot express at just any moment because they are fragile and heartbreaking.”
Esteban birthed Collided Emotions in July 2025 at Skyline Lofts Gallery in Phoenix.
His work was no longer meant to be decorative for others only to collect.
“Some pieces are visually intense. That helped me understand that art doesn’t have to be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be something people look at and say, ‘What a lovely landscape.’ Like the work I used to make. It can also communicate ideas, emotions and realities.”
For Esteban, those realities cross borders. He speaks of organized crime violence in México, immigration raids in the United States and the suffering caused by wars in other parts of the world.
“At the end of the day, what I ask myself is how we have come to inflict so much pain on one another,” he says, with frustration laced in his words.
Art as a way to heal
In his first exhibition, Esteban turned his attention to people and systems he saw as perpetrators.
“To create awareness, you first have to know who is causing the pain and the terror. You have to know the source of that harm,” he says.
He shared truths, as witnessed and confronted by his communities.
“I portrayed them as monsters. Much of that work was made up of skeletons, skulls surrounded by entrails and figures with horrific features. That was the intention: to paint them the way I saw them. Even though I know I fell short.”
His second exhibition Curated Experience took a different direction. Instead of looking at the perpetrators, it focused on those who survive.
“That’s where I talk about the emotions experienced. About what I lived through, and what anyone who has lost a family member or someone close to them continues to live through,” says the artist born in Guanajuato.
Esteban looks back and compares the two stages of his work.
“When I look at what I used to do, I feel it had no spirit, no soul, no purpose. Now I look at what I’m doing, and I feel it has all of those things.”
He repeats a phrase. “This was the mission.”
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