DENVER — From wall texts to articles, every introduction of artist Eamon Ore-Giron highlights his father’s familial ties to Peru as well as his mother’s roots in Arizona. The notion that he is the offspring of two cultures suggests his art is a visual manifestation of Spanish colonialism and Indigenous origins. The potential limitations of this framework are eroded by Ore-Giron himself in podcasts and interviews in which he generously shares his messy creative process of finding inspiration in a legion of sources: gold, Peruvian public monuments to agrarian reform, murals, mid-century Latin American geometric abstraction, ancient and colonial architecture, Mesoamerican deities, and music are all cited with equal importance, troubling a narrow narrative aimed at easy consumption. What may seem like an unfocused, open structure of investigation is rather an intentional engagement with abstraction from a different point of origin.

The artist’s solo exhibition, Competing with Lightning, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver promises the most expansive presentation of Ore-Giron’s painting practice to date. His early figurative work, with surrealist touches, set the foundations for his unique but disorienting exploration of identity. In “Cookin’ 1” (2002) small clouds scaled to suggest a distant vista shift into the foreground, caressing a woman with corn husk stockings and a pitted sweater of dried cactus wood, who stirs a pot alongside another woman. In “Cookin’ 2” (2002) the scene is generally the same, but the women have exchanged pale skin and yellow hair for caramel features. A number of works from this period present figures with no faces at all, like “Exit Strategy” (2005) and “Praise for the Morning” (2004), or brown faces masked by pale ones, as in the Peruvian Chonguinada Dancers dressed as Spanish nobles in “Dazantes” (2001).