CV

In the beginning it was shape, then came light, afterwards colour and finally texture; as in an architectonic creation, the genesis of Juan Medina’s pictorial work rests on a solid structure of techniques and concepts that weave in plastic dimensions his memories made of oil and canvas.

With time, the step from watercolour to oil was the resource that allowed him to approach with mastery the conscience of time incrusted in stone, wood, mirrors and all model-object that transfers Renaissance rhetoric without moralizing it.

Every one of Juan Medina’s paintings where “another” reflected universe emerges, must be seen from this point of view: either the reflect is symmetric to another reality or it projects us, like the Mannerist, into a decomposition of space; hence to another figurative reality, that of memories, of which only he will hold the key.

His work expresses the desire of new understanding of the everyday object, like a scientific approach to a latent reality. During more than 35 years he has painted progressively incorporating techniques and materials that have built a three-dimensional structure of virtual space.

The optic field in his recent works is not a mere assembly of trompe-l’oeil effects, it is the pragmatic synthesis of a hyperrealist-surrealist art that is in Mexico beginning to rid off its folklorizing atavism. In this sense, he is a part of the solid vanguard of Latin American artists that have been widely recognized abroad and that set the bases of Contemporary Art in Mexico.

Jorge Sánchez Becerril, PhD — University of Mexico (UNAM)