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

ARTIST STATEMENT 

 

I am an American-Venezuelan artist. I was born in Valencia, Venezuela, and I work in the United States. I am a conceptual artist who paints.
Since 1994 the investigation has been constant: the human condition, body and soul, chaos and order, the personal and the collective, and the possibility of finding something that can be lived with inside what is painful or broken.
I began with the body (Personae) and the soul (Intrusos), then a brief attempt at their missing link (Engendros), then their union (Personajes II). Mythology followed as a way to name what we share beneath difference (Celebrating Mythology). After the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, I looked for the luminous inside 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 thoughts we carry 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 been different forms of the same question.
The visual language changes because the concept demands it. Style is not the spine of the work. Conviction is.
I work primarily in acrylic, in dense layers, glazes, and varied textures. Childhood memory, urban fragment, everyday objects, and political fact enter the same field. WORKS on this site is the year-by-year map of that investigation, curated from a much larger body.
From every chaos there can be a flower. That has been the line since the beginning.

 

​​BIOGRAPHY

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Arturo Correa is an American-Venezuelan artist, born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1967. He moved to the United States in 1989. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Central Florida (1996) and a Master of Arts in Studio Art, Painting, from New York University (1998).
He works primarily in acrylic. The practice is a sustained investigation of the human condition. The year-by-year record of that investigation is the WORKS section of this site.
His career includes more than fifty solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Venezuela, and abroad. Works are held in the permanent collections of approximately ten museums. He is represented by Ascaso Gallery (Miami and Caracas) and lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.