Juan Araujo

Caracas, Venezuela, 1971

           Juan Araujo develops his work in the fields of painting and drawing, where he traces a series of relationships between art history, architecture and contemporaneity. In the body of his work, one can read a labyrinth of references that define his creative processes, with an emphasis on Latin American architecture and modernism. His work denotes a personal interest in the history of Western culture and, after an exhaustive observation, this interest is turned into the execution of hyperrealistic paintings. His main source of inspiration comes from artists and architects, such as Mark Rothko, Josef Albers and Luis Barragán.

            Using photographs, books and other printed materials, Araujo uses paint as a tool to aid in the interpretation and exhibition of the socio-cultural histories of Latin America. Using a naturalistic technique, mostly oil on wood, he develops a series of intertextualities and questions about the reproduction of images. In his work, the human figure is explicitly left aside, but there remains a ghostly subtlety of the passage of man and his habitat in space.

            Araujo currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is interested in the genesis of modern and postmodern architecture in Europe and the influences that later impacted Latin American cultural development.