NATURE FOR SALE.
Real currency, gold leaf, pearls and hand-built objects turn images of nature into a meditation on value, ownership and the price placed on the living world.
SEE THE
COLLECTION.
Real currency, gold, pearls, hand-built frames and mixed-media detail across the surviving Nature for Sale works.
WHEN THE AUDIENCE
ASKED FOR MORE.
Javier developed Nature for Sale as a follow-up to his traveling installation series The Burden of Our Days, a body of work in which painting and image-making were combined with precious and politically charged materials: real U.S. currency, 22-karat gold leaf, pearls, jewelry and hand-built objects.
Viewers responded strongly to the unusual collision of familiar painted imagery with literal money and luxury materials. The presence of real dollar bills became so recognizable that people began referring to Javier informally as “the dollar bill artist.”
After repeated requests for works that carried the same visual language, Javier created Nature for Sale: a related collection that transferred the material logic of the earlier installations into a more concentrated group of highly finished, collectible works.
The title is deliberately uneasy. Nature appears beautiful, sacred and desirable — and then is literally placed beside the symbols by which society assigns price.
PRECIOUS.
ORDINARY. REAL.
REAL CURRENCY
Actual U.S. dollar bills make financial value physically present inside the work rather than merely represented by paint.
22K GOLD LEAF
Gold carries associations with wealth, sacred imagery, luxury and historical devotional painting.
PEARLS + STONES
Cultured pearls and semi-precious stones introduce material beauty whose market value exists independently of the painted image.
HAND-BUILT FRAMES
The frames are not neutral containers. They are fabricated as part of each work and extend the composition beyond the painted surface.
BARBED WIRE
Hand-made sculptural elements such as barbed wire introduce tension: beauty is framed by restriction, danger and control.
FOUND OBJECTS
Javier's wider mixed-media vocabulary has included jewelry, maps, cloth, medication vials, inert bullets and ordinary household materials.
FIFTY24SF highlighted the material vocabulary that became a signature part of Javier's work: real U.S. currency, 22-karat gold leaf, cultured pearls, semi-precious stones, gold and silver jewelry, medication vials, inert bullets, maps, cloth and found objects. In Javier's practice, the material is never separate from the idea — the subject determines what enters the work and what form the piece ultimately takes.
JAVIER AT FIFTY24SF ↗The currency is genuine. It enters the work carrying the same economic power it possesses outside the frame.
VALUE CHANGES
THE SUBJECT.
In Nature for Sale, money is not a printed motif designed to look like currency. The bills are real. Their presence changes the conceptual weight of whatever appears beside them.
Javier uses material value to ask what economic forces do to the subject of the painting. A bird, landscape, body, icon or natural form can be read differently once literal currency is embedded in the same object.
That strategy continues the logic of The Burden of Our Days: materials do not simply embellish an image. They carry histories and associations of their own — money, devotion, luxury, restriction, illness, violence or desire — and those meanings alter the image they touch.
LOWER HAIGHT
UPPER PLAYGROUND
AT
FIFTY24SF.
FIFTY24SF Gallery, associated with Upper Playground, became an important San Francisco venue for contemporary, street and multidisciplinary art. Javier's work entered that larger creative conversation through exhibitions and the gallery's artist program.
FIFTY24SF's archive documents Javier as an exhibiting artist in the 2013 group exhibition Confluence, alongside artists including Mars-1, Sam Flores, Anthony Lister, Zio Ziegler and others.
The gallery also published an artist profile devoted to Javier's mixed-media practice, highlighting the same materially charged vocabulary seen in Nature for Sale: real currency, 22-karat gold leaf, cultured pearls, semi-precious stones, jewelry and found objects.
During this period, Javier recalls that most of the works from Nature for Sale found buyers. Other pieces later entered private collections or were donated to support fundraising and community causes, extending the life of the series beyond the gallery itself.
NOT OBJECTS
FOR CASUAL SALE.
Javier considers the surviving works museum-level pieces and does not offer them individually for ordinary retail sale.
The collection has dispersed over time. Many works were acquired, while some entered private collections and others were used to support charitable or community fundraising.
The remaining body is intended to be understood as a collection rather than inventory. Javier would consider acquisition of the group as a whole by a museum, institution or significant private collection capable of preserving the relationship among the works.
That distinction matters because the collection is itself about commerce and value. Selling isolated pieces as decorative objects would risk flattening the critique built into the series: the work asks what can be bought, what should be protected, and what happens when nature itself is treated as a commodity.
Archived artist biography documenting Javier's use of currency, 22-karat gold leaf, pearls, jewelry and found objects.
READ ↗ 02 FIFTY24SF EXHIBITIONSGallery history and exhibition archive, including the 2013 Confluence group exhibition featuring Javier.
EXPLORE ↗ 03 QUEER CULTURAL CENTERIndependent documentation of Javier's 2005 work Santo Niño de Nadie, using acrylic, gold leaf, U.S. dollar bills and used medication vials.
VIEW ↗