About EnzoOzne Art

Enzo Ozne Esequiel Ybarra is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, with Salvadoran and Mexican roots. Working across drawing, painting, photography, fashion, florals, and digital media, Ybarra has developed a deeply personal visual language he calls Doodlism—an intuitive practice rooted in repetition, accumulation, memory, and emotional release.

For Ybarra, the work begins before the idea of art. It is a coping mechanism.

Doodlism emerged in 2005 in the break room of a Burger King in East Hollywood. With a ballpoint pen, lined notebook paper, and a traced circle, Ybarra made what would become the first work in a practice spanning more than two decades. Although he had previously studied painting, photography, and banner making at Manual Arts High School, nothing he had created before that moment anticipated the dense, instinctive visual language that would follow.

Raised primarily by his mother after his father left when he was five, Ybarra traces an important part of his creative sensibility to the environment in which he grew up. His mother’s accumulation of objects—what he understood as hoarding—became an unexpected visual and conceptual influence. Density, repetition, excess, resourcefulness, and the transformation of what is already present recur throughout his practice.

His works function as records of lived experience. Some are deliberate and meticulously constructed; others are chaotic, immediate, and emotionally charged. Joy, grief, anger, excitement, frustration, depression, and uncertainty are redirected into mark-making. Rather than illustrating these emotions, Ybarra works through them, allowing the process of creation itself to become an act of endurance.

This distinction remains central to his relationship with his work: what others encounter as art, Ybarra experiences first as survival. Doodlism occupies the space between drawing and autobiography, order and disorder, control and release. Each work becomes evidence of a particular moment—and of having moved through it.

Ybarra’s multidisciplinary practice has also extended into film, fashion, and performance culture. In 2006, he co-directed My Crazy Life with Carlos Arguello and APLA’s MPowerment & Studio. The documentary screened at Outfest and received the award for Outstanding Documentary Short Film. In 2014, Ybarra hand-painted a jumpsuit worn by Missy Elliott during her BET Awards appearance alongside Pharrell Williams.

He later studied Fashion Design at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, expanding his practice through patternmaking, garment construction, and design. In 2018, Ybarra presented a solo exhibition on his birthday, bringing together the evolving visual language he had begun thirteen years earlier.

Across mediums, Ybarra’s practice remains grounded in the same impulse that produced that first circle on notebook paper in 2005: to take whatever life presents and make something from it.

“To other people, it is art. To me, it is coping. I create because I know I will get through whatever comes next.”