Faculty Exhibition: Juan Perdiguero
Artist Statement
My work is mixed media on chemically treated gelatin silver paper. The drawings or monochromatic paintings that I create are free hand renderings of animals and human figures, where chiaroscuro plays a predominant role, and the application of the ink, through a reductive process, gives the work an ambiguous pictorial sense. Above all, I look for simplicity and balance. I manipulate the technical borders between painting, drawing and photographic processes as a way to create images that attract, seduce, confront and engage the viewer’s subconscious mind. My desire to find crossovers between mediums is aimed at better defining the need for a more personal vision of the figurative aesthetics of representation and the humanistic concepts that are the base of my work.
I am interested on to the study of current ideas in psychology, psychotherapy, spirituality and philosophy that explore the political and socio-cultural conditioning that influences human behavior in contemporary society. The emotional impact of my images communicates a profound and personal psychological response of the time I am living. The representation of animals and humans that I create symbolizes hidden aspects of the modern condition of the human animal, and while reflecting on the animalistic side of our alienated existence, they become psychological manifestations of the inner psyche that transmit profound feelings of solitude and anxiety.
My work is deeply rooted in figuration, coming from the tradition of the Spanish Baroque School. I wish to explore the frontier between the classic and the contemporary by pushing the conceptual and aesthetical sources of this tradition and its historical influence on my art. By using innovative ways of drawing, I create images that are classical in appearance but strongly contemporary in the way they are conceptualized and rendered. These extreme realistic representations of animals and humans are intertwined with abstract and surreal landscapes of pictorial marks that try to psychologically and emotionally engage the viewer. The animals shinning gaze is fixed on something that goes beyond our mental understanding and that creates a sense of restlessness.