UNREAL WORLD BY REAL PEOPLE Painting

Born 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently lives and works in Berlin. Juan Arata works in a variety of media including drawing, installation, video, and most prolifically, painting. His figurative paintings feature bold fields of color, both enigmatic and illustrative marks, and the distorted visages and disembodied appendages of his imagined subjects. In the grotesque tradition of George Grosz, Arata describes in paint a cast of motley and gruesome characters caught in the follies of urban life. Though these portraits are developed intuitively, Arata is precise in shaping the uncanny affects of these bizarre and comedic figures, his mark-making and paint application mimetically attuned to the fraught gestures or blank stares of each persona. For Arata, his consistent use of saccharine and neon colors underscores the web of desire and false expectations that mark the absurdity of the contemporary condition: the asinine pursuit of the bright, shiny, and new. The paintings are sometimes paired in diptychs whose images mirror each other - dual portraits that give further emphasis to the egocentric, repetitive, cyclical worlds of these characters. In Arata's video and installation work he expands upon his interest in repetition and cyclical time, coaxing the uncanny from banal objects and occurrences as well as familiar media images and sound bites. Imbued with both humor and sharp critique, Arata's work are driven by a profound sense of the absurdity of the everyday.