JoCa builds portraits that refuse to hold still. The Mexican-Spanish painter works in oil on canvas, letting faces fracture, dissolve, and reassemble across the surface — eyes surfacing where they shouldn't, features layered and interrupted — in a language built around the unfinished, the non finito. The work treats identity not as fixed but as perpetually under construction, shaped by technology, memory, and contemporary life.
The Dreamer and the Unfinished Face
The Dreamer is the series where JoCa's central idea is most legible. The figure is built up and broken down in the same gesture, so the face surfaces and disappears at once — closer to a memory than a likeness. The Dreamer (17) (55 × 45 cm, 2026) moves between dissolved passages and firmer, resolved marks, holding atmosphere and structure in one image. The Dreamer (18) takes the same enquiry into a 50 × 50 cm square, where the format gives the head nowhere to hide.
The scale across the series is deliberately intimate. The Dreamer 5 works at 45 × 45 cm, and Ghastlighting (1) (50 × 46 cm, 2025) at a similar reach — paintings that ask to be read from close in rather than across a room. Ghastlighting plays its title between the spectral and the psychological, a nod to gaslighting and the haunted edges of perception, and the features build and break accordingly.
Why Does JoCa Leave a Face Unfinished?
Because the unfinished state is the subject, not a shortcut to it. Non finito is a historical term for work deliberately left incomplete, and JoCa uses it as an argument about identity: a person is not a settled image but something continually being assembled, interrupted, and reassembled. A finished, resolved portrait would contradict the point it is trying to make.
That is also why the interruptions are so precise. The pictorial discharges and layered marks are not accidents of process — they are placed, and they are where the painting does its thinking. You can see how that plays out in the studio in JoCa's studio feature on identity, technology, and the fractured self.
Love of Dutch Moves the Work Larger
The Love of Dutch paintings give the same vocabulary considerably more room. Love of Dutch (4) and Love of Dutch (5) both work at 108 × 88 cm, and Love of Dutch (3) Extended stretches to 143 × 90 cm across an extended horizontal field.
Scale changes what the fragmentation does. In the small portraits, the interruptions read as psychological — something withheld. At 143 cm wide, they become architectural: the eye travels laterally across interrupted passages and reworked marks, and the image behaves less like a face and more like a structure that keeps declining to close.
Seeds, Force, and the Conceptual Paintings
Alongside the portraits, JoCa runs a conceptual strand built on the seed as an image of contained potential. Nuclear Seed (150 × 150 cm, 2025) is the monumental statement of it — the seed as a source of life set against the nuclear as an unstable, transformative power, with the square format concentrating the tension rather than releasing it.
Its counterweights are smaller and quieter. Settled Seed (45 × 45 cm, 2025) is potential grounded rather than in flux, built through restrained tonal modulation toward equilibrium, and Processed Seed (45 × 45 cm) sits in the same register. Read next to the Self Assemble canvases and La Bruja, they show a practice that moves between the figure and the diagram without changing its underlying question.
How Collecting Works at an Online Gallery
Every JoCa painting is a unique work — one canvas, one owner, mounted on a professional wooden frame and supplied with a certificate of authenticity. There is no edition to fall back on, which means availability moves quickly and the collection page is the only reliable record of what is still on offer at any given moment.
Art of NOMA publishes the price on every work rather than hiding it behind “price on request,” so you can decide whether something is in reach before you speak to anyone. It is an online gallery: no room to walk into, no one hovering while you decide. You can sit with a painting for three weeks and then ask a question, and the answer comes from the people who actually placed the work.
Browse every current work on the JoCa collection, explore more original paintings, or meet the full roster on our artists page.