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

ARTIST STATEMENT 

 

 

My practice emerges from the vibrant collision between chaos and clarity. I construct a sustained dialogue between the two worlds that have shaped my sensibility: Venezuela, where I was born beneath a sky heavy with history, intense light, and social complexity, and the United States, a context of reinvention, artistic inquiry, and personal transformation.
I am a conceptual artist who works in painting. Since 1994 my investigation has remained constant: the human condition — body and soul, chaos and order, the personal and the collective, and the possibility of finding something positive in what is painful or broken.
I began by exploring the body (Personajes) and the soul (Intrusos), then their possible missing link (Engendros), and finally their union (Personajes II). I continued with mythology as a reflection of what we share beneath apparent differences (Celebrating Mythology). After the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, I searched for the luminous within destruction (From Chaos to Flowers). The illness and death of my brother Carlos from ALS in 2006, together with the birth of my son that same year, turned the gaze inward: the dense, accumulating thoughts we carry every day became tangled branches (Enredaderas). From there, flowers, horses of body and spirit, empty roads (Route 16), the student resistance in Venezuela, censorship, assemblages, and the graphic re-reading of earlier series have all been different forms of the same question.
The visual language changes because the concept demands it. As Picasso said, style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula for years and years, sometimes for a whole lifetime.
I will never jeopardize my creation for the sake of style, no matter what the status quo of the art establishment demands.
I work primarily in acrylic, building densely layered surfaces that achieve oil-like depth through subtle transparencies, glazes, and varied textures. I integrate childhood memories, urban fragments, symbolically charged everyday objects, and socio-political realities into visual fields that are at once intimate and expansive. Series such as Solos en el Chimborazo exemplify this direction: restrained yet potent formal strategies that witness individual courage and existential solitude confronting structures of power, while engaging broader themes of migration, resilience, cultural tension, and the possibility of hope.
Rooted in the chromatic vitality and rhythmic sensibility of Latin American traditions, my work extends well beyond regional boundaries. It draws specificity from lived cultural experience but operates in a universal register, offering viewers from diverse contexts a space for reflection on identity, belonging, memory, and connection in a fragmented world.
From every chaos there can be a flower. That has been the line since the beginning.