The paintings of Julian Touceda reach back to the natural beauty of his native Honduras and forward to a time of social harmony, when humankind has evolved beyond its cultural walls and won the struggle for freedom. His brightly colored works deserve careful scrutiny; in them, symbols like mangos, hummingbirds, flags and bilingual graffiti carry clear meanings that point starkly to the violence, greed and betrayal of the modern world and place these works squarely within the realm of social realism.

Julian, a full-time artist, immigrated with his family to the United States. Yet his ideals of truth and beauty refer back to his earliest years in Tela, Honduras, where as a child his creativity had emerged in his grandmother's back yard. Julian freely wandered behind it to the shores of the Tela River and the Caribbean Sea. These images, along with mountain range, exotic birds, and childhood memories appear in his volumes of Art works.

Despite the beauty of Honduras, it was controlled by foreign plantation owners and political dictatorships. The Touceda family part Gaelic Spanish and part Mestizo Indian, landed in Louisiana and the suburbs of Kenner in 1960. Unable to speak English, Julian communicated in school by drawing beautiful pictures of his homeland. Through a program for gifted children, he spent haft of his high school days studying art at Delgado Community College and graduated in fine art from the Louisiana State University of New Orleans in 1980.

While studying Eurocentric art, Julian grew out of his cultural roots. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he relearned the Spanish language and his cultural identity while living in New Orleans and New York City.  Along the way, he picked up the self-confidence and courage to speak out about injustice. In 1996, Univision Spanish Network aired throughout the U.S. and Latin America a documentary on Julian's artwork, focusing on his willingness to make social statements and the not-so-subtle demand, in his paintings, for social justice.

In 1992, the year of the Quincentennial, Julian's paintings shifted into the vibrant primary colors of Latin America and the American flag. "I didn't intend to contrive a color pattern," Julian says. "Rather, after the process of Hispanicization, I was combining with Americanization to blend together into one culture and that is the culture of art."

Other interesting notes include the artist's use of large squares to focus on a storyline and small-square patterns that greatly add vibrance; his use of matte board to apply subtle texturing; and the graffiti messages that add verbal dimensions to the paintings and clarify their messages. A quick note about the presence of writing: In some paintings, huge vertical or horizontal words are titles of a series, like Arte America( Arte America: The Other 1996 and The Lucha Libre 1998 at Doc Gallery in New Orleans), a visual trilogy based on the artist concept of Art, and Culture that focus on the “Social Realism” of the Hispanic people in the United States, and their Pan American commonality in the Americas (Western Hemisphere).

“Because of the large Hispanic population in the United States,” he said, “we are seeing what I consider to be a cultural evolution in the United States. It is this cultural evolution that has inspired me to create a pictorial history of the Hispanic world, and the hope that the Anglo and African American will have a better understanding of the Latin Culture, and embrace its complexities and not fear it.”

Touceda said “Arte America” is a combination of many styles that he has used throughout his career. “The ever-changing themes and colorful motifs promote not only my Hispanic culture but different trends of contemporary art in the new century,” he said. “The rich regional canopy of New Orleans on the edge, of the Tropical Sphere blend with its historical commonality to the rest of the Latin American Diaspora.”

In 2000, Julian curative Arte America “The Lucha Libre” exhibition that brought varies artists to showcase their struggle at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. This was Julian Touceda second installation exhibition of Arte-America. The third installation of Arte-America: Manifest Destiny was exhibited at Doc Gallery in 2001, in New Orleans.

After the flooding and destruction of New Orleans(2005) by Hurricane Katrina, Julian Alberto Touceda moved to Texas.