A R T U R O C O R R E A

ARTIST STATEMENT 

 

 

My work is a vibrant collision of chaos and clarity, a visual dialogue between the worlds I inhabit—Venezuela, where I was born under a sky thick with history and heat, and the United States, where I shed my old skin to become an artist. It’s a restless dance of identities, a kaleidoscope of roots and reinvention, where every stroke of paint is both a memory and a provocation.
 

Growing up amidst my parents’ spirited debates on science, human behavior, and the fragile mechanics of existence, I came to see art as a kind of alchemy—not to mend what’s broken in a literal sense, but to reframe the fractured, absurd, and radiant pieces of life through a lens that dares you to look twice. I was shaped by the raw, unapologetic energy of post-modernists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose jagged lines pulse with rebellion; the intricate, almost archaeological layers of Robert Rauschenberg, who taught me to excavate meaning from the discarded; and the fierce, untamed spirit of Oswaldo Vigas, whose work hums with the primal songs of Latin America. Their influences weave through my hands, threading memory, myth, and a sharp-edged irony into tapestries of color and form that refuse to sit still.
 

My Venezuelan heritage is the heartbeat beneath it all—a deep, resonant pulse of pre-Columbian echoes, family lore, and the land’s stubborn rituals. In my early paintings, figures in uniforms marched across the canvas—soldiers, schoolboys, priests—blending the vivid hues of Latin folk traditions with a playful yet piercing commentary on power and belonging. Those works were love letters to a childhood spent watching the world argue with itself, steeped in the rhythms of a culture that laughs in the face of its own scars. As I’ve carved a life between two continents, my art has morphed into a bridge—not a passive span, but a living, swaying structure that mirrors both the chasms and the unexpected kinships of human experience. 
 

Each piece I create is a negotiation, a push-and-pull between the visceral and the cerebral, the ancestral and the alien. I layer textures like a storyteller piling fables atop one another—rough-hewn surfaces that whisper of Caracas streets, splashes of color that recall the untamed Caribbean Sea, and shapes that twist like the myths my grandmother once spun. It’s a conversation that doesn’t seek resolution but thrives in the tension, inviting viewers to step into the fray, to find their own footing amid the clamor of my dual worlds. This is my practice: not a quiet retreat, but a bold, messy celebration of the threads that bind us—and the ones we dare to unravel.

 

 

 

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