Andrés Camilo is a Colombian-born, Los Angeles–based artist working within a language of magical realism. He works from an instinct shaped by survival and a deep, embodied knowing, using precision to hold it in place. His paintings take form through animals and built surfaces, where feeling is held in the image rather than explained.

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His work brings together nature, erotic charge, and spiritual exploration as expressions of the same force. Nature carries instinct without language. The erotic locates intuition in the body. The spiritual emerges through moments of recognition rather than being told what to believe.

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Andrés immigrated to the United States as a child and later served as an officer in the U.S. Army, including a deployment to Afghanistan during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Painting began afterward as a way to process trauma and return to the body as a place of recognition rather than control. What started as a private process became a sustained practice.

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In the ongoing Firewood series, he develops surfaces that mimic wood and woven structures. Referencing both structure and fuel, the work is built to be consumed through transformation. It reflects a recurring pattern in his life of building, losing, and starting again. The loss of his home and studio in the Palisades fire made this relationship explicit. Much of his work was destroyed. What remained was the process. He shifted into a more portable practice, working primarily in watercolor, continuing to build under constraint and in close proximity to the subject.

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He has exhibited in Southern California, including the Riverside Art Museum and 18th Street Arts Center, and has participated as a speaker at Frieze Los Angeles. Through exhibiting, he creates space for others to recognize their own instinct. The practice remains rooted in the same cycle of ignition, use, and return.