"Matilde" Painting

Julián RenÖ is a Colombian visual artist whose figurative work explores identity, memory, solitude, desire, belief and the strange territories that exist between reality and imagination.

Working primarily on paper, RenÖ constructs enigmatic figures and psychologically charged scenes through an expressive use of color, texture and symbolism. His characters often appear suspended outside a specific time or place: intimate yet theatrical, familiar yet slightly unsettling. Masks, altered bodies, mythological references and unexpected details recur throughout his work, suggesting stories without fully revealing them.

At the center of his current practice is The Imaginarium, an evolving body of work inhabited by characters who seem to belong to the same elusive universe. Rather than illustrating a fixed narrative, each painting exists independently while offering fragments of a larger world. The story remains deliberately incomplete, allowing the viewer to imagine what happened before the scene and what might happen after it.

RenÖ's visual language has been shaped by his background in advertising, graphic design and illustration, as well as studies in screenwriting, film direction and photography. These influences can be traced in the staging of his figures, his attention to character and his distinctly cinematic approach to composition.

Alongside The Imaginarium, his practice includes portraiture and more intimate figurative works, reflecting an ongoing fascination with the human figure as a place where beauty, vulnerability, contradiction and fiction can coexist.

For RenÖ, painting is ultimately a form of storytelling without explanation: an image does not need to reveal its entire story in order to make us feel that one exists.