SEARCHING | Ascaso Gallery | Miami
SEARCHING | Ascaso Gallery | Miami
SEARCHING | Ascaso Gallery
SEARCHING | Ascaso Gallery
Customized by CORREA 100% made by VANS
Customized by CORREA 100% made by VANS
VIRTUAL OVERLOOK | 2007 - 2011
All rights are reserved by Arturo Correa, and works may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, except with the prior written permission of Arturo Correa
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work stages a dynamic collision between chaos and clarity, enacting a visual dialogue between the two worlds I inhabit: Venezuela, where I was born beneath a sky saturated with history and heat, and the United States, the site of artistic reinvention and self-transformation. This is not static hybridity but a performative negotiation of identities—a kaleidoscopic interplay of rootedness and rupture—where every mark on the canvas functions simultaneously as mnemonic trace and critical provocation.
Raised amid my parents’ animated discourses on science, human behavior, and the precarious ontology of existence, I conceive of art as a contemporary form of alchemy: not literal repair, but a reframing operation that renders the fractured, absurd, and luminous legible through deliberate estrangement. My work draws from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s insurgent, jagged line-work pulsing with subaltern defiance; Robert Rauschenberg’s archaeological accretion of the discarded, excavating meaning from detritus; and Oswaldo Vigas’s primal, mythic resonance channeling ancestral currents of the continent. These influences interlace memory, myth, and incisive irony into chromatic and formal structures that refuse stasis.
The pulse of my Venezuelan heritage—pre-Columbian echoes, familial lore, and the land’s tenacious rituals—underpins everything. Early paintings deployed uniformed figures (soldiers, saints) traversing saturated folk palettes, fusing affection and critique in commentaries on power, belonging, and cultural resilience.
Between 2009 and 2017, although not all of my production during this period was political, I deliberately developed and incorporated a sustained body of politically engaged work that bore direct witness to the escalating repression under the Chávez and Maduro regimes. Faced with documented violence against student protesters and civilian dissenters, ethical necessity overrode caution: silence in the face of atrocity was not an option. The series Solos en el Chimborazo (developed principally in 2014 and 2017) crystallized this commitment, employing stark white backgrounds as both formal strategy and metaphorical device to evoke the radical solitude and moral purity of unarmed youth confronting armored power with makeshift means—sticks, stones, cardboard shields, and rosaries—in an act of near-delirious yet historically generative courage.
Living across continents, my practice has become a tensile bridge: not a passive connector, but an oscillating structure that mirrors abyssal divides and unforeseen solidarities alike. Each canvas negotiates the visceral and the discursive, layering street-scarred textures, Caribbean chromatic eruptions, and mythic contortions. The resulting dialogue thrives in unresolved tension, inviting viewers to inhabit the interstices of my dual worlds.
This is my practice: an embodied, turbulent affirmation of the threads that bind us—and those we must have the courage to sever.
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