Details

First Name

Juan Luis

Last Name

Landaeta

Username

juanluis

Website

http://www.juanluislandaeta.com

Country of residence

United States (US)

Statement

Statement

What drives my works is interaction. The violence or harmony with which the figures, composed of chromatic values, converse with each other, repel each other. Interactions are abstract. What happens between two colors, or between one and a tone, does not need the figure to occur. Nor major forms.

I want to convey an environment in which I do not know precisely what is going on, what is happening there, but which certainly, being only color or spatial dialogue (with the background, the frame, with the edges of the figures) manages to question me, to affect me, to please me. In my works it is easier to disappear as an individual and to be diluted in movements, silences, rhythms, sensations. Everything that happens in our minds most of the time (sometimes, when we let it be) and that we perceive without ideas, desists from material unity.

My work is about doubt, about astonishment. Of what we are before it, not because of what it is, but because of what it reflects: It’s not that I say “this is deep, look here”, but that what is there, really just reflects things that are happening: spatial relationships, contrasts, harmonies.

I think my works have to do with the most essential existential approach or character, the one that refers to the forms of life, including our own, and understanding that life reveals itself in forms that are not always expected, or that totally unpublished. The forms resemble each other. What happens between them is what I am proposing. These works can be molecules seen in a telescope, a forest immersed in the water of a fishbowl, a neighboring galaxy, the iridescent ripples of oil in a street puddle. The work is all that, but it is also the mirror of a doubt. What we are in front of those forms, the space, and why a painting makes us feel and think that the thing we see represents something we are, that somehow what we see, what we experience, already happens inside us. The matter that I reflect is the matter that composes me. The matter that I pursue is the matter that I lack. The work I conclude is a question I have just asked.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions
  1. Jardín Desierto, Brooklyn, NY, 2017. Solo show.
  2. The Identity of the Line, Interamerican Development Bank Staff Gallery,  Washington DC, 2019. Solo show.
  3. Unwritten, Mehari Sequar Gallery, Washington DC, 2019. Solo show.
  4. New Works / New Paintings, Spirit del Art Gallery, New York City, 2024. Solo show.

Interests and medias

Interests

Mixed media, Painting

Painting medias

Acrylic, Fresco, Gesso, Ink, Oil