For Cande Aguilar, the hand-painted signs of the Rio Grande Valley define contemporary painting more than museums do.
Brownsville, Texas | @barriopop
Brownsville artist Cande Aguilar makes a bold assertion: never mind museums and blue-chip galleries—contemporary painting exists all around us, every day, every place. This painter’s art education started in his borderlands hometown, encountering boldly colored, deftly stylized rótulos, those hand-painted signs ubiquitous in grocery store windows, taquerías, and family restaurants. Aguilar learned the visual language of painting in these small bursts of handmade, graphic everyday life, absorbing lessons in color harmony and contrast, compositional hierarchy, brush technique, and lettering style.
In a statement about his work, Aguilar says, “I’m drawn to the way rótulos use color unapologetically—pairing electric reds with baby blues, mustard yellows with deep blacks—creating a natural tension that pulls the eye.”
In exuberant multi-panel paintings, Aguilar acts as a graphic mixmaster, riffing on fragments of perception with quick-flash samples of charming signs seen on any drive through the towns dotting the Rio Grande Valley. Pecans for sale, conjunto music tonight, yellow meat watermelons on sale NOW and—what did that other one say? Something about valley lemons?
Aguilar’s chosen pseudonym, barrioPOP, succinctly describes equal to any form of painting. “I’m asserting that they belong in the conversation of contemporary painting—not as reference, but as foundation,” he states unequivocally.
While a Warholian quality certainly maintains in Aguilar’s freehand, obsessively collected borrowings, he infuses his painted world with the charm of neighborhood immersion, and bends his arc of awareness toward a vision of the contentious U.S.-Mexico border as a site of cultural exchange and evolution. A March 12 Instagram post on his @barriopop feed reverberates with the artist’s resolute positivity, describing a multi-panel 2025 painting titled La Fem: “Rainbow arcs cut through the piece like glimpses of hope—reminders that even in spaces of division, resilience and beauty emerge.”
