Details

First Name

Juan

Last Name

Guzman

Username

juan

Bio

I believe I am a romantic.

Website

juancamiloguzman.com

Country of residence

Italy

Statement

Statement

 

I shop as an artistic practice. What I like about the things I buy is their attitude. Today, everything is susceptible to reproduction and is over-aestheticized. The allure of imagery and objects is what blindfolds us not only in public but in private as well. My work looks like something from now, something commercial, like a poster or a postcard, cold, playful, and attractive at first sigh. I am interested in ambivalence and contradiction.

 

I talk about the world in a paradoxical way. I choose images from mass culture to talk about politics, art, painting, cultural issues, taste, the material world, pleasure, power, sexuality, gender and the role of the artist’s external life in the larger culture. I give the viewer an active role and contrast what they see with their own experiences and preconceptions.

 

I’m interested in images and how they are a construction, in cosmetics instead of aesthetics, in the nature of all of these issues as images. By adding more and more layers, I distort what is already distorted. If the world so twisted at times, why not view it with a little bit of humor? I’m able to make jokes without smiling.

 

The very notion of art is determined by decisions you don’t make, this becomes more evident if you are not from the Northern Hemisphere, the limitations to make decolonized decisions in the art field, show us that there is no way to alter the system or to be outside the system. Once assimilated the impossibility to make truly decolonized art. I explore these difficult matters not in order to solve them, but to implicitly highlight their deep entanglement with social relations of power and exploitation.

 

As an artist I feel that I need to understand what my place is in history and in the institutional system of production, the contemporary economic system in other words. As Latin Americans we understand our condition in external terms, so it is a problem of representation. We can only use the media of representation that are available, and to use and question the media of representation you are already making a political decision. What are the possibilities of the medium? It is hard to capture a subject through image, to show the content of the representation but the tools of representation itself. I try to bring everything to the surface and make it explicit. Remember: too much sugar could take off your legs.

Interests and medias

Interests

Collage, Interactive art, Mixed media, Painting, Photography, Printmaking

Painting medias

Acrylic, Ink, Vitreous enamel

Printmaking medias

Computer printing

Collage medias

Digital collage / eCollage

Photography

Digital image