juan Rodríguez Varón
Bogotá, Colombia (b. 1988).
Juan Rodríguez Varón's paintings collapse the natural world that surrounds us into a sensory display of light, colour, form and movement. Starting with simple everyday events, such as the quality of a shadow or the effect created by light projecting through water, Juan begins by trying to imitate these phenomena in his paintings.
Yet in applying layers of paint, his painting materials begin to take on a life of their own and start to speak for themselves. Transparency, vibrations between colours, the plasticity of a brushstroke - all of these qualities become the actual subjects of his work. As such, Juan's paintings move between figuration and abstraction, creating constant tension between the two.
For Juan, painting involves the arrangement of colours on a surface in order to capture light, space and the tension between them. It's a free-thinking approach to image-making that helps Juan to capture the energy and vitality of the natural world that surrounds him and the elusive elements that shape it.
