This painting reinterprets the Allegory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the Mexican colonial painter José de Páez. The burning heart has become a pixelated one, its crown of thorns reduced to a band of green squares, and the cross above it is shattered between an Alpha and an Omega, the collapse of time and space that happens inside a screen. The flames and rays around it are still painted by hand, a traditional glory surrounding a heart made of pixels. The word pixel is short for "picture element," the smallest unit an image can be broken into, and this heart is broken into exactly those.

I grew up on 8-bit games in Puerto Rico in the 1980s. It was an innocent pastime then, and it turned out to be the training ground for everything that followed. The loops, the rewards, and the design language of those games are the bones of the applications we live inside now. The cherubs circling the heart are drawn from my son. The dogs on the ground are from my own childhood. Behind them stands my first elementary school, abandoned, and the cherries in the tree are pixelated, the same cherries Pac-Man chased as his first bonus fruit.

Two putti sit in the foreground with a remote control and a smartphone, the instruments that changed both worship and ordinary life, one for the television of my childhood and one for the screen of my son's. This is the earliest painting in the exhibition, made six years before most of the others, and the pixelated heart it introduced returns in Mater Meme and Influencer Divino.

Through its imagery, “8-Bit Sacred Heart” comments on the pervasive influence of technology, its addictive qualities, and how it has reshaped our perception of the world. The painting mourns something older than the games. The artist reflects on how screen culture has become as central to our lives as religion once was, while also mourning the innocence and simplicity lost in the process of this digital transformation.