Juan Araujo
dal 9/7/2008 al 6/9/2008
Segnalato da
9/7/2008
Juan Araujo
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC, Santiago de Compostela
Araujo presents series or sets of works carried out on the basis of photographs of houses, partial images of urban facades or reproductions found in different books on landscaping and architecture. On the basis he copies it and transforms it to draw up a new image which talks of the original fragment and the painted fragment, of painting in endogenous relation with the painting itself and in exogenous relation with what is outside it.
In the majority of his works Juan Araujo (Caracas, Venezuela, 1971) presents series or sets of works carried out on the basis of photographs of houses, partial images of urban façades or reproductions found in different books on landscaping and architecture. On the basis, therefore, of the fragment of a scrambled image, he copies it and transforms it to draw up a new image which talks of the original fragment and the painted fragment, of painting in endogenous relation with the painting itself and in exogenous relation with what is outside it.
But far from focussing on the mere fact of quoting and on appropriationism, the work of this Venezuelan artist reflects on history, on the images themselves and on their permanence and modernisation in time through different formulas of capture, adaptation and circulation. It is, in short, a perfect example of meditated reflection on the strategies and paradoxes which characterise the truly complex world of the image.
After the success of his interventions in the 27th São Paulo Biennial and the 6th Mercosul Biennial, held in 2006 and 2007, respectively, Juan Araujo arrives in Santiago de Compostela with a series of works done between 2007 and 2008 and inspired by the building devised by Álvaro Siza and its surroundings. These recent paintings form the bulk of the individual exhibition titled A través, which is completed by the inclusion of some previous series of paintings (e.g. those related to the Bo Bardi, Canoas and Caoma houses or the Coloritmos suit of paintings), where the buildings are the subject of study and analysis and where the architectonic fragments and details take on a significant role, becoming the centre of the representations. The strategies used by the artist are very similar: the attention to a series of fragments of the architecture, the care with which he treats the details of the building or of some catalogues, the seriality, the importance of documentation and the meticulous aesthetics derived from the copying of photographs.
Juan Araujo’s proposals are indirect graphical signs which paradoxically draft the status of the image in the present, the power of icons, the omnipresence of systems of reproduction and the inter-textual relationships which can be posed between different images. These mediated and indirect representations provide the strategies and paradoxes through which to question and update the tangled world of images in order to face the complex conditions which art and culture are suffering after the remodification deriving from the crisis of the modern paradigm.
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC
Rua Valle Inclan s/n, Santiago de Compostela Spagna