Nicanor Aráoz

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981

            Nicanor Aráoz produces objects and sculptures, makes of his works large hyperrealist installations which have as reference comics and the world of the Internet, particularly YouTube, along with romantic mythologies of gothic art. He describes the web as a collective and social dream, a swift archive from which he takes elements as diverse as the aesthetics of anime, the design of commercial brands, the universe of the rave and its rites, the fictional universes of video games, existential poetry, mystical traditions and the forms of biological organisms, especially those associated with the monstrous. Throughout his career he has used surrealism as a laboratory, a great breeding ground that integrates the dreamlike and the unconscious. 

            His beginnings date back to the Faculty of Psychology in the city of La Plata, a career he chose because he was interested in psychoanalytic theory. Then he switched to the Faculty of Arts, where he became obsessed with hyperrealism; as sculpture was not enough for him, he decided to study taxidermy. Something about cutting open bodies, pulling out the entrails of animals to dissect them, helped him to construct the latest work of the moment. His sculptures are often flagellated, as if Nicanor were forcing us not to ignore the violence of the world. They take on frenetic forms that resemble nightmares, where pain and enjoyment are interconnected. 

            His artistic path oscillates between baroque and minimalism. In his beginnings he practiced a basic economy of resources, but later he made of his productions works overloaded with information: large amounts of cookies, the exploration of old materials, ghosts, toys, animals, food. Later, he returned to the minimum resource: two pieces are enough to generate a great work. Nicanor is a researcher and compulsive consumer of books, photos, music and cinema; a voracity in which pop culture and classic horror mix with digital data, where technology, biotechnology, and nature also enter into dialogue. Between the amorous and the bloody, Aráoz produces works that resemble a ritual: that of summoning a moment of liminality between what is creepy and what is attractive.