A statement
My artistic practice is characterized by the persistence on the traditional mediums of drawing and painting and the cross-boundaries (and its contaminations) between mediums such as photography, video, writing and installation.
In a commitment and persistence in the tradition of painting (revisioning this tradition), when painting I try to enter through the space of language, to widen it, to open new paths, new forms. To find new places in language. I look for new possibilities that wandering allows, for the unknown that risks both the failure, and the meeting of what is not yet known.
In a constant tension between figuration and abstraction, my painting pursues an intermediary, relational space, exploring what is hidden in the limits of language.
We, painter and painting, figure it out along the way.
There’s an erotic pursue through painting.
It is the painting that imposes a direction within the process of being made - and so I have to live up to. It takes an agile lightness, a distraction of deep attention, a forgetfulness that allows concentration in the creative act. Painting time is a time of dynamics, successions, gestures, attention intensities to certain things, a set of vision and action-reaction of the artist's body, and the body of the ink. The meaning in motion.
The artistic project is thought as an essay, an approach: to the painting and to the understanding of things. This notion of rehearsal refers to the idea of path, exercise, intention, which is infinite in itself. It is an attitude of predisposition to know. To paint as a way to exist and to be, to portray in works the sensations and perceptions.
My practice has a belief that art-making is an identity making process, a space of creation and re-creation of the self and of our available language to perceive and act in the world. If there’s no language we don’t exist, we cannot communicate with others and with ourselves. It’s a violence, an oppression, a heavy rock to break. An urgency to make my own image(s), my own place(s), to discover and create my identity through and in language.
I use to work with found and appropriated material keeping an archive (in permanent construction) creating a relation with collected elements of my daily life. Further, this archival method assumes the dimension of an atlas where these heterogeneous things are put in a silent conversation, arranged and rearranged to provoke a glimpse of new possibilities. This put in relation of found and life material leaves to make a new sense of things in my world, to construct Fictional Truths, as a way of achieving a kind of truth through artistic creation that has no room sometimes in our daily experience of real life.
From the personal archive to the found appropriate material, it always works from personal experiences.
There is a concern to create representations of images of our time (here photography and attention to popular culture help to see), informed by a critical study of past works (of art history, mythologies, symbols, religion). The commitment to figuration tries to give back to the figure timeless values, to create new images to a new larger understanding of human bodies and power relations.
The artist, an active subject born and fed by globalization and its products - needs to formulate new flexible structures capable of responding to the complexity of the times - seeks to create roots, build connections and new alternative senses. There is a vindication of the wandering as the availability and experimentation for the being to discover oneself, new ways of being, and new creative and expressive possibilities. A line is presented that structures this heterogeneity and the position as creator subject in the defense of the transitive, the state of becoming as an openness to the unknown and a commitment to the renewal.
Juliana Julieta, 2020