Blending critical discourse with striking visual documentation, this volume is both a tribute to a singular exhibition and a testament to Juan Araujo's enduring exploration of memory, perception, and the shifting nature of visual heritage.
This two-sided volume offers an immersive journey into Juan Araujo's artistic practice, serving both as a record of his exhibition at Palazzo Massimo and as a monograph on his most significant works of recent years. More than a mere catalog, it is a reflection on Araujo's ongoing dialogue with art history, architecture, and cultural memory—an exploration of how images endure, transform, and accumulate meaning over time.
Through critical essays by Inês Grosso, Giulio Figarolo di Gropello, Luis Pérez-Oramas and Stéphane Verger, alongside an in-depth conversation between Araujo and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, the book delves into the artist's meticulous process of appropriation and reinterpretation. Richly illustrated, it captures his ability to bridge past and present, making visible the layers of time embedded in art and architecture.
Spanning centuries of artistic heritage, from early Hellenistic art to the expressive gestures of
Cy Twombly, Araujo's practice transcends time, weaving an intricate web of references that trace the echoes of history within contemporary visual language. His work is an exploration of interwoven cultural patterns, where the act of painting becomes a means of reactivating and recontextualizing artistic traditions.
The structure of the book itself mirrors Araujo's philosophy: a play of opposites, where the material and the immaterial, the ephemeral and the eternal, continuously intersect. As he states, "My paintings are a constant dialogue between the visible and the invisible, where color becomes a visual metaphor for that which transcends the tangible."
Juan Araujo was born in 1971 in Caracas, Venezuela and since 1998 has been including appropriations of familiar elements of modern and postmodern culture and environment into his works. The Venezuelan artist started by creating paintings that studied the history of art by reproducing artists' work found in books, catalogues and online. Araujo has intensely investigated the history of Western culture, art history and modernism in his practice.
Due to this study and replication of the symbols of culture and modernism that surround us, his works provide a complex network of connections and references. They often point our attention towards well-known architects like Luis Barragán, Pancho Guedes, Burle Marx and
Lina Bo Bardi or artists like
Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and Jorge Molder.
After Araujo moved to Portugal from Venezuela his interest in the development of European modern and postmodern architecture deepened. He became fascinated with how these ideas arrived in Latin America to influence the development of 20th Century Latin American architecture.
His work is found in public collections including Tate, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art of New York, New York, USA; Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Inhotim Center for Contemporary Art, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Art Now International Collection, San Francisco; Fundación Mercantil, Caracas; Cisneros Collection, Caracas and the Berezdivin Collection, San Juan.
