---
title: "Stefhany Y Lozano painted 26 hands. Gesture became the subject"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/stefhany-lozano-hands-language-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/stefhany-lozano-hands-language-en.md"
category: "creative"
tags: ["Stefhany Y Lozano", "painting", "illustration", "hands", "gesture", "creative process"]
published_at: "2026-08-21T08:48:00.000Z"
author: "Jules Garnier"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/stefhany-lozano-hands-language-fr.md"
---

# Stefhany Y Lozano painted 26 hands. Gesture became the subject

In Stefhany Y Lozano’s work, hands stop decorating the scene and start carrying its emotion, eventually shaping a process built around lists, constraints and homemade templates.

In Stefhany Y Lozano's paintings, hands have gradually taken on an oddly large share of the storytelling. A figure holds flowers, raises a phone above a reclining body, nudges sunglasses upward or lets fingers disappear into hair; before the face has done much at all, the gesture has already changed the temperature of the scene.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/)

Lozano describes hands as a way to communicate, because the tension in a finger or a small shift in position can alter the emotional reading of an image.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/) The more interesting part is what happened after she kept returning to them. The motif stopped being merely recognizable and began shaping how the work itself was made.

## Twenty-six hands

*Rock Paper Scissors* shows that shift most clearly. Creative Boom describes **26 paintings of hands**, sold one per day over Christmas.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/) On the primary project page, IRZ found a wonderfully literal confirmation of the count: files called `1piedra`, `2papel` and `3Tijera`, followed by `hand01` through `hand23`.[2](https://stefhanyylozano.com/rockpaperscissors/)

Before the separate overview image, that is twenty-six project images. The first three begin with gestures whose meaning is already widely understood, rock, paper and scissors, while the numbered studies move closer, change the angle, open or fold fingers and gradually make the hand feel less like anatomy attached to a character. It is the character.

> **26 paintings**
> - rock / paper / scissors gestures: 3
> - numbered hand studies: 23
> - central motif: the hand: 1
> IRZ audit of the primary Rock Paper Scissors page

## Faces recede

The same idea continues through more recent work. *Intimidad Pública*, added to Lozano's portfolio in July 2026, leans heavily on body position, a phone held above the body and sunglasses raised just enough to look over them; those gestures carry much of the tension between private behavior and being observed.[4](https://stefhanyylozano.com/intimidad-publica/) *Coqueta*, published on the portfolio that same month, moves through mirrors, cosmetics, hair and hands, letting attitude emerge without making the face explain everything.[5](https://stefhanyylozano.com/coqueta/)

That is why hands are so convenient in narrative painting. An obviously sad face can be bossy about meaning, whereas a hand tightened around a phone remains suspiciously open-ended. It might suggest impatience, discomfort or concentration, or it may simply document the peculiar posture people now adopt while holding a glass rectangle for hours.

Lozano explicitly connects the work to body language and says that gestures and posture can stand in for facial expressions.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/) The painting gets to show something without quite closing the case.

> Illustration: Stefhany Y Lozano beside a painting from Intimidad Pública. In Intimidad Pública, gesture, the phone and body position carry as much of the scene as the face. Credit: [Stefhany Y Lozano · photo Jakob Adolphi](https://stefhanyylozano.com/intimidad-publica/).

## Homemade rules

Her preparation is almost the opposite of the romantic image of an artist filling sketchbooks until a picture eventually appears. Lozano begins with a list: first a topic, then the scenes she wants to portray. Rough drawings come later on whatever scraps of paper happen to be in the studio, and she says she has never owned a proper sketchbook.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/)

By the time painting begins, several choices have already been taken off the table. She works from a fixed palette and a handful of canvas sizes, then composes on the wall with rulers and templates she built for herself.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/) The point is not to make every picture identical; it is to stop spending attention on questions that do not need a fresh answer every time.

What remains is closer to a bounded playing field than a recipe. Size moves less, some colors barely move, the composition has a framework, and attention can go toward gesture, scene and the relationship between bodies. The same trick turns up everywhere in creative work: a typographic grid, three recurring formats or a deliberately short palette can create room precisely because choice has been removed somewhere else.

## Into fabric

The strongest test comes when the hands leave canvas entirely. For *Chain of Unity*, Lozano rebuilt them as textile forms in a **350 cm** fabric piece made for the *Floating Curtains* exhibition.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/)[3](https://stefhanyylozano.com/chainofunity/) Underbridge says the 2024 exhibition gathered fifteen artists and was shown in Innsbruck and Hamburg.[6](https://www.hnrx.at/unterbridge-arts-worldwide)

Changing material strips away many of the supports a painted hand normally has: the modeling changes, the frame disappears and the scale starts pushing the hand toward becoming an object in space. Yet the vocabulary remains immediately recognizable, which is useful evidence that the motif is stronger than a particular painting technique.

> Illustration: Stefhany Y Lozano in her studio with textile hand forms related to Chain of Unity. Chain of Unity takes hand forms out of the painting and rebuilds them as fabric objects. Credit: [Stefhany Y Lozano · photo Jakob Adolphi](https://stefhanyylozano.com/chainofunity/).

## Audience outside

Another rule is less physical. Lozano says that, in her personal work, she tries not to think about the audience while making it.[1](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/) That sits comfortably beside highly readable images once the two kinds of constraint are separated: her lists, scenes, formats, palette and templates govern production, while the eventual viewer is not assigned a compulsory emotional response.

There is something healthy in that distinction. A practice can become coherent without every result becoming predictable; a hand, crop or color may feel unmistakably hers while the painting still leaves room for the person standing in front of it.

## Incomplete language

“Language” still needs to stay a metaphor. The twenty-six hands in *Rock Paper Scissors* do not map to twenty-six fixed meanings, and Lozano is obviously not claiming to have invented a parallel alphabet. What appears instead is a store of small tensions: an extended finger, an open palm, a hand occupied by an object, a gesture cut by the edge of the frame. The forms recur, but the surrounding scene keeps changing what they mean.

That may be the easiest part of the method to borrow without borrowing the style. Pick one detail strong enough to carry a scene, repeat it long enough to notice its variations, then build enough constraints around it that every new piece does not begin from absolute zero.

Lozano started with hands. After twenty-six paintings, several later series and a three-and-a-half-metre textile piece, they are no longer simply a subject she likes to draw. They have also become a way to organize the work.

## References

1. [Creative Boom, Hands are the protagonist: Stefhany Y Lozano, 2026](https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/hands-are-the-protagonist-stefhany-y-lozano-on-communicating-with-fingers-and-gestures-in-her-paintings/)
2. [Stefhany Y Lozano, Rock Paper Scissors](https://stefhanyylozano.com/rockpaperscissors/)
3. [Stefhany Y Lozano, Chain of unity](https://stefhanyylozano.com/chainofunity/)
4. [Stefhany Y Lozano, Intimidad Pública](https://stefhanyylozano.com/intimidad-publica/)
5. [Stefhany Y Lozano, Coqueta](https://stefhanyylozano.com/coqueta/)
6. [HNRX, Underbridge Festival 2024 / Floating Curtains](https://www.hnrx.at/unterbridge-arts-worldwide)