Juan Arango Palacios
Artist and Designer
Informed by my experience as a queer Colombian immigrant, my work explores how the human figure becomes a site through which cultural values, desire, and power are expressed and negotiated. Through figurative painting, I construct narratives that draw from the visual languages of Latin American art, Catholic imagery, and archaic mythology. I am interested in how the representation of the body shapes ideas about masculinity, sexuality, and social hierarchies, and how these ideas can be challenged through the recontextualization of popular narratives. My approach to painting engages with the history of painting while introducing contemporary references. Artists such as Débora Arango, Diego Rivera, and Fernando Botero inform my treatment of the figure. In my paintings, classical subjects coexist with Reggaeton lyrics, magical realism, internet culture, and the visual language of American queer communities. Through these juxtapositions, I bring historical and contemporary imagery into conversation, reconsidering the cultural values embedded within popular visual narratives.
Painting is my primary medium, and my training as a painter informs the way I approach all aspects of my practice. As an image-maker, I am interested not only in producing images but in giving them a physical presence that can endure beyond my lifetime. I am drawn to the permanence of materials and the possibility of creating paintings, sculptures, and installations that might outlast the civilizations that produced them. This interest is connected to my desire to leave a trace of queer existence at a time when the lives and histories of queer people remain under threat. I have thus become increasingly interested in concrete and cement. These materials are embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life, allowing my work to enter into a conversation with the built environment while imagining alternative forms of permanence within it. Their versatility also allows me to move between image and object: cement functioning as a painting through the fresco process or taking sculptural form through casting. Through these material explorations, I seek to create images and objects that contribute to a visual culture in which queer people are not only represented, but afforded dignity, visibility, and a lasting sense of belonging.
Color and composition are central to how I construct images. Informed by the color theories of Josef Albers and David Batchelor, I use vibrant palettes, dynamic compositions, and shifts in scale to create scenes that move between the familiar and the fantastical. My compositions draw on the visual intensity of religious imagery, the atmosphere of nightlife, and the blurred memory of the immigrant experience. Across these different references and materials, I am interested in making images that complicate familiar ways of seeing the body and its relationship to desire, masculinity, and power.