“Drawing activates the unconscious, exploring stereotypes and archetypes that reappear in new forms.” — Daniel Guajardo
Little Nightmares brings together a series of drawings that emerge from the accumulation and reconfiguration of images drawn from contemporary visual culture. Sourced from school magazines, comics, digital archives, and screenshots, these images are translated into drawings as an exercise in material translation and symbolic displacement.
In this process, Guajardo constructs a visual field in which multiple temporalities and imaginaries—local and global, historical and digital—overlap, generating compositions that operate as palimpsests. Rather than representing scenes, the drawings articulate relationships: between original and copy, between mass circulation and informal appropriation, between the recognizable and its deformation.
The work inhabits an intermediate territory between figuration and abstraction, where the gestural quality of the line and the materiality of the support actively shape the production of meaning. Drawing does not function here as a medium of representation, but as a space of experimentation in which images are subjected to processes of accumulation, repetition, and distortion.
Within this context, the persistence of certain icons—often charged with stereotypes or unresolved historical tensions—reveals how these imaginaries continue to circulate in the present, particularly within the digital environment. Their reappearance is not neutral: it activates layers of memory, conflict, and ambiguity.
Without proposing closed narratives, these works operate as open fragments that shift the familiar into zones of strangeness. In this movement, Little Nightmares can be read as a constellation of scenes in which the everyday is destabilized, giving rise to a visual experience that oscillates between irony, unease, and the suspension of meaning.
May 2026
