Evanx Aguiluz

Evanx Aguiluz (he/him) is a New Jersey–born, Massachusetts-based mixed-media artist creating work in a self-defined style he calls Post-Traumatic Pop Art, where trauma, nostalgia, spirituality, recovery, and humor intersect with the language of pop culture. Through painting, assemblage, digital collage, and salvaged childhood objects, he maps the ways the sacred hides inside the mundane—and how memory, wit, and a touch of absurdity can become a pathway toward healing.

My work lives at the intersection of memory, technology, and survival. I collect fragments — childhood toys, forgotten electronics, bits of the past — and merge them with paint, humor, and light. These are not just objects, but emotional hard drives: they store the echoes of places and people I’ve known, the versions of myself that had to restart.

Each piece is part of an ongoing recovery — not from one event, but from a lifetime of near-deaths, literal and emotional. I call this process Post-Traumatic Pop Art. It’s a language built from what was once broken, translated through the symbols of pop culture, nostalgia, and the early digital age. My materials are scavenged from both the real and virtual worlds — duct tape, game controllers, CRT monitors, Mickey figurines, baseballs, cables, relics of play — all reassembled into shrines of resilience.

In Near Death XP, for example, a red-painted controller is taped to the canvas like an artifact from another timeline — a playful nod to Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, but also a deeply personal gesture. It ties together humor, grief, and the urge to keep playing even when the game feels over.

I often return to the apartment where I grew up to gather materials. The act of searching through my mother’s home is like an excavation — finding not just objects, but emotional proof that I’m still connected to where I began. These works become portals, reboot screens, places where loss and nostalgia meet color, sound, and reflection.

Through painting, assemblage, and light, I try to transform pain into presence. Each work is a form of resurrection — a reminder that what survives is not what’s untouched, but what’s transformed.

Message of hope: Keep going.