Juan Rojo

I have always been a somewhat classical portrait painter. I was educated and trained by looking at the work of German Expressionists and painters of the School of London. However, in the last few years video has slowly taken over my work and has compelled me to redefine not only my subjects, but also my approach to painting.

The first step towards this change was the incorporation of collage to my pictorial process. I was looking for an environment where I could juxtapose photographic materials and painting in order to create hybrid, more layered images. Projecting videos to the paintings seemed the natural next step, since I found that the blending of the projected image and the pictorial surface gained in subtlety. From that moment on, video has reclaimed its own space in the form of stand-alone projections that refer both to the pictorial quality of cinema and to the artist’s role as a voyeur.

Most of my videos are born from a very straightforward idea --the recording of a simple process or action usually performed without giving it any thought, such as eating, cleaning, or applying make-up. The importance of choosing this kind of actions is two-fold: first, they are deeply interiorized, a fact that makes the non-professional performers play their part without really feeling that they are acting, just repeating something that they have done thousands of times; second, I can recreate “true” moments of intimacy by capturing the natural way in which the body communicates.

The non-professional actors that I use in my work are means, bodies that carry ideas and understandings of painting. They are canvases where the pictorial process happens; the body undergoes this transformation without showing any physical changes. Instead, the only action at work in the videos is their own creation. Women who apply make-up and wipe it out right after, women playing with their hair for no apparent reason, encounters and hugs between two women with no narrative behind them –I have tried to emphasize the actions per se, the importance of the time spent performing them, and the emotional associations that they carry.

Bio,

Juan Rojo was born in Valladolid, Spain in 1977. He graduated from the University of Salamanca with a degree in Fine Arts. In 2001 he won the “Jóvenes Creadores” Painting Contest. In 2002 he earned a grant to attend the workshop of the Spanish painter Antonio Lopez at the International University Menendez Pelayo (Santander) and was a finalist for the “Rafael de Penagos” Drawing Award and his work was exhibited in a collection show at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid. He has participated in numerous expositions, such as "La pared roja" in the Museum of Salamanca in 2004 and “American Works” in 2006 in the Spanish Department of Georgetown University. He is currently obtaining a Masters degree in painting at the University of Maryland and living in Washington D.C.