Born in Caracas-Venezuela, 1966, Juan Bolivar's paintings occupy seemingly extreme positions investigating the language of abstraction.
Bolivars paintings deal with formalism and abstraction as a language reconfigured. They playfully exist somewhere between abstraction and the recognisable world, hinting both at humour and tragedy, whilst investigating our relationship to language and cognition.
Painted in an an austere 'grey-scale' palette reminiscent of the artist On Kawara, recent works by Bolivar question the appropriate manner in which these paintings could/should/ought to be read, as their tone oscillates from 'dead-pan' irreverence, to the factual-vernacular-historical, and to the comical.
