Texts and Interviews

The review addresses hybrid identity and social relations in Brines’s work. It connects his ambiguous characters and pictorial language with contemporary experience and the relationship between the individual and the collective.

The text explores the amusement park’s attraction and darker side. It places Brines’s humour and irony against the distance between appearance, spectacle and social reality.

The gallery brings Brines’s and Hendrik Zimmer’s processes into dialogue: figuration and abstraction, image construction and continuity between works. Painting emerges as an ongoing investigation.

An artist who addresses social issues through a witty visual language has arrived in Korea: the South American artist Starsky Brines.

His universe is filled with strange beings. Clowns, dogs, cats and characters whose forms cannot quite be identified appear. Who is staging this circus, and for whom? The artist behind these works is the Venezuelan Starsky Brines.

His exhibition takes place at G Gallery in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul. Running from March 7 to April 6, it is titled CIRCUS. Its subject is animal abuse, a worldwide issue. Starsky has frequently connected personal experiences with contemporary social and cultural concerns, and this exhibition continues that approach. Even so, it is lively, energetic and at times seemingly endearing—qualities that seem connected to his witty visual language.

That language also emerges from his working method. Before beginning a work, he does not draw up a detailed plan; he follows the brush across the canvas. His strokes are therefore direct, dynamic and full of speed. At the same time, they breathe life into the characters in his paintings.

For Starsky, violence is a human instinct. While many people hide it away, he deliberately seeks it out and keeps it visible. He reveals the opposing dimensions of humanity and violence without hesitation. The wild and absurd behaviour of his characters gives expression to this.

What remains after looking at several works in this exhibition? Loving and hating; being loved and being hated. One senses the recurring distortions of feeling between humans and animals, or between people, and the reality that accompanies them.

Recent exhibitions in Korea have often favoured photography, architecture and sculpture over painting. Starsky Brines’s exhibition offers an opportunity to experience the power of painting once again.

The presentation connects Brines’s painting with theatre, fantasy and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It highlights the coexistence of poetry and comedy with a critical view of human experience.

For Starsky Brines, drawing goes beyond tracing a preliminary draft of a work, be it a painting or a sculpture — it is first and foremost a discipline in itself, draughtsmanship elevated to autonomous form. In other words, drawing is conceived by this artist as a process embodied in and brought about through mutable action, in turn leading to a relentless performance rendered through strokes, lines, colors and diverse supports. Brines’ drawings, which stem from a deep-seated need to forthrightly articulate and express whatever may be the case, bear the distinctive marks of meditative introspection carried out in the midst of restless creativity.

Realizing that drawings are hand-shaped thoughts, the artist outlines imaginary beings meant to render his personal universe. A place inhabited by anthropo- and zoomorphic figures, clowns and jesters, birds anatomically fastened to figures reminiscent of comic strip heroes. Likewise, he feels free to appropriate fragments or entire scenes from authoritative sources in the official canon of Western art, such as Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798) and Jeremias van Winghe’s A Kitchen Interior with a Maid (1613).

Brines obsessively observes people, animals and objects in his surroundings, which he then constructs and deconstructs. Color balloons, dogs, robots, doodles, bulls, hens and chicks — whether animal or object, these figures are bedecked with ears and horns, even fowl, and the female all wear crowns (2003–2007). These elements form the basis of a visual vocabulary whose iteration allows the artist to organize them in series. The series thus becomes, in Brines’ work, an aesthetic procedure. Here, repetition and thematic variation amount to a visual time line framing works drawn at different moments.

Crumpled paper of different colors torn out from notebooks, newspaper sheets from the crime sections of local tabloids like Últimas Noticias or 2001 become adaptable supports for works in big format (244 × 184 cm) or relatively smaller ones (21.5 × 28 cm). Brines conceptualizes and draws in them with no respect for material consistency or standardized format. This informality extends to his drawing tools: pencils, pens and crayons. Brines actually embraces a mix of tools and materials, including charcoal, wax crayons, enamel, watercolor, oil, acrylics, chalk, industrial paints and Krink markers for graffiti art.

Far from partaking of the traditional ethos of draughtsmanship — i.e., the production of exact replicas of nature or bodily parts —, Brines’ drawings embrace the logic of distortion. The resulting images often seem amorphous, even abstract, but can also adopt qualities usually associated with naïf art — candid figures seemingly reminiscent of a childish hand drawing heedless doodles. But although distorted, these drawings are not caricatures. On the contrary, when drawing a chicken or a bull, a robot or a skull or a street image, the artist humanizes his figures, just as he animalizes human motifs. In resonance with Basquiat, some of Brines’ topics arise from images native to urban subcultures.

Connected to the swift lines of graffiti or the flat figures in comic strips, they are almost always devoid of perspective and shadows, drawn without a “negative space” capable of anchoring them to a context. In some of his works he favors the methods and techniques of the first avant-garde movements of the twentieth century (Dadaism, Surrealism), so highly appreciated by contemporary visual artists, instinctively mixing sketch and color with collage and superimposed writing, or engaging in interventions with predesigned and recovered figures. The artist thus uses ads found in newspapers or sensationalist news of crimes, and turns them into subplots inserted in his own autobiography.

Starsky Brines can be seen as an artist who makes use of drawing to capture and clarify his inner world. In our digital age, his craft does not melt away in a computer screen. A compulsion to draw following semiautomatic thought processes seems to egg him on constantly. This may explain the extraordinary breadth of his work. Brines hoards all sorts of drawings and each and all of his projects, piles of sheets referring to and mirroring each other though perfectly distinct from one another: a confession variously drawn for the viewer to analyze while reveling in each drawing and its peculiarities. Brines says that through his work he “strives to place the viewer at the crossing of private and public, between our most somber shadows and the fake happiness our contemporary culture strives to sell us. [These works] draw on the push and drive of society. By distorting forms, I redesign the human so as to configure a zoomorphic bestiary related to memory and recollection.” And he pointedly adds that memory is seen by him as “a means to connect with the viewer, offering him an encounter of past and present through which to playfully engage in a fleeting intimacy with the tragic and absurd aspects of our bankrupt societies.”

Introductory text · Starsky Brines

In a Universe of Elective Affinities

For me, this book is, above all, a joy in the craft.

“Collaboration” between artists is always a pleasure, a tool for comprehension and understanding that helps ideas and images flow. It allows an exercise in unexpected encounters, in which imagination and the creative process can bring different ideas and ways of seeing into dialogue, so that they converge in a space beyond individual authorship without losing each individual universe’s sense of belonging. In a broader sense, it has also offered release to the photographic archives of my paintings and drawings. Through Ricardo Báez’s work and way of looking, these archives have developed an eloquent dialogue, revealing visual convergences through new readings of my work and assembling a vast universe in which the visual event becomes a celebration of graphic design and its textures.

This fortunate construction, built with more than two eyes and two hands, is a good example of those universal causalities, those elective affinities, as Goethe would say, that sometimes arise: briefly coinciding with another creator and allowing a shared gaze to flow, with new appearances and new dialogues that enable us to approach ourselves with renewed vision. In other hands, and with another pulse, they are enriched and help give structure to new solutions. This dynamic of connections between texts and codes, this existence of multiple surfaces, carries a symbolic charge that reaches lovingly towards the seer — that is, the reader as gaze — inviting them into this adventure between universes. Its intensely interwoven texts propose an immense collage of presences, creating a kind of theatrical “landscape” in which the two artists present undress and clothe our dreams, our disguises and our fires, in a book-arrow launched into the vast, expansive universe of the heart.

Starsky Brines. Caracas, June 2016.

I

Since I was raised in Maturín and spent my entire childhood in that area, apart from long holidays in Caracas, I would say that eastern Venezuela is magical, festive, cheerful and easy to fall in love with, because people make you part of their family with great human warmth. The East is also landscape, plains, rivers, ghosts and goblins: an entire imaginative world accompanying those of us who have lived there.

II

Speaking of landscapes, those of Maturín were the first subjects of my early paintings. The light of Monagas could surely explain, in part, my choice of palette. At carnival, the city was completely transformed. My mother was responsible for making a great many costumes, both for carnival groups and for us, neighbours and relatives, and I was always her trusted mannequin. [Laughs.] So clowns and celebrations were the order of the day. Today it is clear that these experiences underpin an essential part of my painting.

III

I remember coming across an elephant on an avenue one day. It was a very crazy situation, but undoubtedly also a magical and sinister moment.

IV

At the Chucho Palacios exhibition park and its San Simón fair, my mother once rented a kiosk to sell her handicrafts, which included some charming little monsters. While I was at the kiosk helping her, I noticed a painter sitting on the ground right beside us, offering painted pieces of tree bark and little mirrors. I approached him, and after generously showing me what he did, he kindly gave me a piece of bark for me to paint. He was a tremendous encouragement to me. I remember that my curiosity stayed with me, and I was enrolled in painting school. One day, unexpectedly, he visited me at art school. To me it was extraordinary. I hope he — Antonio — can read this and know that his gesture was decisive in my life.

It is not at all easy to describe Starsky’s work. Appearances, once again, deceive us. Influence takes many forms; the layers overlap each other; the strokes; the roughly encrypted messages.

By way of a diary, Starsky Brines’s work (Caracas, Venezuela, 1977) acknowledges his surroundings, what affects and appeals to him; what is necessary to denounce and what is worthy of praise. From the white canvas to the intervened photography; from engraving (which he is beginning to try) to two-dimensional images; from the chromatics that draws on his all-pervading native Caribbean, to the black and White, so full of possibilities, and strong enough to catch the spectator.

Here lies the universe of this young artist, both condensed and shredded.

Starsky, what led you to devote yourself to art?

After a childhood surrounded by animals and the exuberant nature of the eastern plains of Venezuela, of sharing life with my mother’s crafts, and a certain economic hardship assumed with lots of humor at the time, which in one way or another marks you as time passes, a childhood full of freedom and adventure, but with conflicts and disagreements, like every other life, and then moving to Caracas.

All of these facts made fertile ground for my work as an artist. A clear disagreement with sudden changes, caused by the fact of moving the city, awoke in me. This led me to try to turn my emotions into images.

It is a matter of identity and belonging what leads me to throw my viscerality into painting. But there is no particular reason: there is a cluster of situations that conspired to submerge me in this way of expression. Seeing wonderful things emerging from fabrics, felt; seeing waste containers become puppets in the hands of my mother impressed me a lot, and I think that was a determining factor for my decision to become an artist.

Anyway, I always wanted to be a painter, and from that desire, I developed my ability. I always painted. Apparently, the form of expression chooses you. And between one experience and the other, arrives the time of deciding what you’re going to do with your life, and, for various reasons, the chance of making art my lifestyle was given to me. On one occasion, a friend of mine told me that the Venezuelan artist Jesús Soto, one of the greatest exponents of kinetic art, needed an assistant. I took the job and at that moment, I understood that art would be my life. The possibilities of becoming an artist took a completely different meaning during my workdays in that workshop; I decided to enroll in Art School.

What are your interests as an artist today?

I understand art as a work open to speculation and aesthetic enjoyment that, does not fakes its paint nature and elementary condition. It is figurative and open to the possibilities offered by my time and surroundings; made of pictorial material that invites to be discovered; composed of colors, stains and lines that allow encounters with a reality exacerbated and amplified to distortion, to evoke everyday situations and the dynamism of the city hidden from us .

You speak about painting, but drawings are the base of your work.

Drawing is a specific element in my proposal: it opens up spaces and allows me to boost the composition, which develops in an organized chaos, where different realities interact together. You can decrypt phrases and comments in a palimpsest of visual possibilities, quotes from everyday life. Because my painting is a painting that comes from painting per se, from work and persistence. The idea of ​​saying more with less as always seduced me, communicating with what is at hand. Making other people’s guts vibrate, with a drawing pencil and a piece of paper, with a gesture that contains life and connects the viewer.

I seek to move people with a work made with my own hands, a work with no pretentions. That interests me, and that people can enjoy from the naturalness of a gesture and rejoice in the beauty of everyday things, that can also become complex and profound, without limiting the provocation, irreverence and social criticism that art should possess. I want to show true images that make people experience pain and joy at the same time. I try to evoke the transitory nature of existence, and the fragility of life.

That everyday life to which you refer is in your work titles. How does a phrase like "Our lives are revenge and lies" (2009), "The cool air hits me in the face" (2009), "If it hurts so much laugh like a pig" (2009) or "What does it matter where you step?”(2009) become artistic work?

When used as titles of my works, they create a change in the perception of the painted image and becomes the closure of the plastic process. Phrases create a greater chance of relationship and become more polysemic images, so that perception is not literal. They bring a ludic component to play with the relationship between ideas and concepts, creating a dual distortion of real life.

As Hockney would say, it seems a contradiction but it is not, then, using these phrases as titles, which for me are in themselves powerful images, create another one, extended, larger, with an undulating and multi-referential purpose. We can then have absurd situations that enrich the discourse of painting and that end up being consumed by the viewer within the plausible possibilities the image, itself, offers. It is difficult for me to decide which of these phrases attracts more my attention. They are like a countersense, absurd, and that inevitably seduces me.

The prominence of the human figure is inevitable in your paintings, a figure that tends to morph with the animal.

At first, it was the result of trying to explain my reality and evoke the equation province-metropolis, with all the symbolism that may arise from it. Today I would say that it is the human being as the central focus of my painting, which metamorphoses into a sort of multiple being. Perhaps it responds to an idea of a mutant human, that is animal, that is human, very human, murderer and victim at the same time. I think it's a portrait of the human race full of prejudice and archetypes. The animal world has always been a source of thought and, above all, mystery. It is that thing that has no concept, but is in us and at any moment can reveal itself and become the cruelest beings on earth; and at the same time, love, mourn and feel deep compassion.

That, in the end, makes them self-portraits.

Yes indeed. I feel like what I see around me is the portrait of myself in other circumstances. What causes commotion in me, as for to take it to the canvas, is an image of what I could be, what I could have been and what I am: spectator and actor, stimulus and stimulant.

Says your Spanish gallerist that anything influences you, from a conversation in the street to a visit to the Museo del Prado. How are you able to maintain a consistent style when your work feeds from so many sources?

That is an attitude towards life. I have learned to use everything within my reach. My work is open to the future; I intend not to lock myself in an image, and develop projects that life presents me. But for something, that open, to achieve its effects, exercise and constancy are essential. I try not to be always the same and let things have an impact on me, affecting me, to make me look different. On every trip, every walk out of my house, I explore and retain what I think is necessary for my paintings. I keep it as an image or immanent presence as internal stimulus, as a nightmare and fear, and, at some point, that internal memo becomes an image.

To the specialized critics, your pictorial work is increasingly violent, or contains more violence. Do you agree with this?

Although sometimes my characters seem humorous, at the background of my work something dark lies, just as in life. It is part of the ancient battle between good and evil. In my canvas, nobody is really bad ...or really good.

They all live in the daily struggle for survival, and, meanwhile, fall in love, argue, walk or pose. The issue of violence is present in me through the fear and loneliness experienced at certain times in my life.

With art, among other things, I learned to use that feeling in my favor. It has helped me to heal and to accept what I am. When you are in the province, it is not hard to face death and violence. For example, one breeds animals, feels affection for them and then slaughters and eats them. See how they become food leaves any child disturbed.

These experiences allowed me to take some small distance, which paradoxically made it possible for me to approach death and violence, and then, as an adult, understanding they’re a part of life and let it seep into what I do. Along with this, there’s all the extraordinary fables and tales of ghosts and witches that constitute the Venezuelan provincial imaginary, which translates into a form of violence based on fear, and for a child it doesn’t feel like a game

When as a kid we visited my family in Caracas, we experienced many clashes between gangs, crossfire. And when we moved here, it somehow turned into daily life. I cannot say that this is what is happening right now in the country, but I can attest that the issue of violence has radicalized. And you have to learn to deal with the stress it causes. You convince yourself that everything could turn against you at any time. In my country, the problem requires action, requires commitment from the citizens. I am an artist, but also a human being who walks through my city, who lives and feels, who suffers the pain of seeing loved ones killed.

I consider it my duty to report and point out the matter. Otherwise, I would not be honest with my way of dealing with painting.

Your compositions are very chaotic, very visceral, cumulative ... How do they start and, above all, how do you know when they’re finished?

They start with a sort of dynamic meditation in front of the support, shaking my mind and my body from one place to another. Maybe I seek an image that serves as a trigger, background music and lots of adrenaline, until I start to stain the fabric, synchronizing my body and mind.

Plastic struggle is then undertaken, struggle with ideas, with previous advances that may not work in a new fabric. It is a process of tensions, of zooming in and out on the images; of glazing signs and symbols, where everything wants to scream at the same time. Then I negotiate with them until some balance is achieved. Each one settles in its proper place. That's how pressure starts to decrease; action time is shorter and I distance myself, until I see what happened. This does not determine if the work is finished, but indicates a breakthrough. How do they end? When I’ve vomited everything and there is no more space. Then I look for another canvas and it all starts again

The remarkable thing about these compositions is that drama, tragedy, the grotesque, the playful and the ironic are kept in the same level. How is this balance possible?

The way you describe my images fits Caracas very well, where it seems that everything is happening at once; it’s an explosion of anecdotal, picturesque, playful and dramatic images.

In addition, I like to think that my painting responds to that way of existing: maybe it's the ability of transferring reality to media, to understand by observing and analyzing the already developed image. Just as the photo steals a supposed reality and turns it into something else, that’s stills totally linked to the first. It is difficult to understand, but we manage to maintain balance.

To what does your vibrant chromaticism respond? Is it a way to catch the viewer?

I think it is correspondent with the existing light in Venezuela, which makes everything shiny and vibrant. The colors are intense and Caracas is a city full of colors. We are accustomed to use colors in our clothing, accessories. This is a tropical country, full of fruit, blue skies, party, carnivals and, in that sense, this is part of my identity. This inevitably catches the viewer, but this is first a feature of my environment and then a feature of my paintings. I have another body of work entitled Urban Bestiary, where I do not use color. In any case, I think the audience can be caught with black and white. Approaching the viewer consists of something else

Part of your work is based on drawings and paintings that you start from scratch, but we must also take into account those works in which the base are existing photographs or newspaper pages. I guess the way you proceed in each case is different. What are the similarities and differences between each process?

When there is a preset image, you start from that picture and it gives you data to create a dialogue, seek interferences and relationships, whether is a photograph or a page of a diary, because both media have specific graphic features and, in many cases, they’re provided with texts that enrich or, conversely, are highly determinative.

They are different ways of facing plastic expression. What sets them apart, in my case, is that when I confront the blank canvas there’s a silence, a time of introspection, perhaps a little more internal. The fabric leads you to think, to wander in situations. When there is a preset image, it interrogates you and forces you to think about it. The action starts at that point. I would say it’s like two times: one is more intimate, and the other, on the contrary, points to the collective and the social. However, it might not always be this way: recently in my compositions that start from scratch the influence of my paintings on newspapers can be seen, like in the series No happy ends. Because nothing is still, or determined; everything is intimately related.

Rereading the titles of your work again ... Have you ever thought about dedicating yourself to writing?

Yes I’ve thought about writing ...but I don’t know about devoting myself to writing ... Perhaps painting is a very jealous art form, and it doesn’t leave me enough time to take writing seriously, but I’ve made some texts for my artist friends and the occasional story about violence. Sometimes I like it, and I get passionate about it, but painting requires so much time, and I am happy to devote myself to it.

A work that draws both from personal experiences and environment, would radically change if you decided to leave Caracas?

I don’t think so. What Caracas gave me is already in me, and wherever I am that way of feeling will be reflected. In addition, each city has its own peculiarities and similarities with others. I will probably seek for the essence of what I do wherever I am. Identity and memory exists everywhere, and that interests me. And anything that could be happening to me, both sensitively and emotionally, will find a way to speak, allowing me to start new projects and artistic proposals, building bridges with what I am, and what I could be experiencing at that particular time. Caracas does not limit me, on the contrary, she has taught me that I can work my way out with whatever I have at hand.

Have you already defined what your next goals will be?

I'm always reconsidering and rearranging my work. Now I’m using very conventional materials that I had set aside, such as oil.I want to add greater plastic richness, depth and light to my images, and oil is ideal for it. I'm also experimenting with photography. I'm taking pictures now, I’m no longer intervening other peoples photographs; instead I’m setting scenarios in correspondence with the aesthetic that I have been proposing in the Project: Urban Bestiary.I recreate spaces trying to achieve consistency with my painting, working with models and experimenting with light, and then I intervene photography with painting again. I'm also making graphics, thanks to the invitation of a large collection that has a specific project for this medium, and that has allowed me to take in new ideas and research possibilities.

Mireia A. Puigventós examines paper as a medium for experimentation and the different approaches of the exhibiting artists. Her discussion of Starsky Brines considers his anthropomorphic beings, humour and manifestations of the sinister. The PDF preserves the original review in Spanish and English.

Ramos examines the maturation of five painters associated with the 2005 Pintón project. In Brines, she identifies ambiguous figures and tensions between humour, fear and tragedy. The text places his research within a generation and a shared artistic trajectory.

“You are no longer linen, humble plane, canvas.”

Rafael Alberti

In its current iteration, the work of Starsky Brines (Caracas, 1977) paradoxically links different media, including photography, painting and drawing. Here, images are appropriated from printed publications and promotional material from the film industry, then worked over, digitized and copied. Following this initial metamorphosis, the selected motifs—generally faces and figures, although also interior scenes and panoramic views—may undergo further modifications, so that a process of technical reproduction leads to a unique work rather than multiple copies.

The matter becomes more complicated as soon as the viewer realizes that some of the “original” images depict film stars, even though their faces have been smudged or literally scribbled over. This is, of course, a practice akin to defacing street posters: adding moustaches to advertising models, lengthening electoral candidates' noses or erasing the smiles of corporate idols. These are deformed portraits with incongruous features—horns, snouts, wings—whose identity remains hidden or partially visible within a palimpsest of lines and stains.

These works imply a narrative, an effect produced by making use of the captions accompanying the appropriated images and reinforced by occasional annotations and written marks. Brines's characters thus appear to inhabit a separate universe, cut off from their immediate surroundings and immersed in events known only to them. Their stories unfold in a space-time limbo governed by extreme impulses that fluctuate between comedy and drama.

Despite a severely restricted palette, limited largely to black, white and a few other tones, the logic of the pictorial discourse retains its expressive force, subverting the mirror-like fidelity of photographic representation. There, in that play of crossings-out and absurd apparitions, instinct prevails over appearances. Consequently, the attributes and meanings of the underlying images are left at the mercy of brushstrokes and drawn marks, while the eye—that instrument of sensitive discrimination—revels in the surface's virtual thickness, attempting to decipher the meaning of forms.

Ultimately, staining or scratching other people's photographs has a double connotation. On the one hand, it can be understood as an exercise in the symbolic demolition of the signifier; on the other, as an extended manifestation of the form-making gesture. In both cases, however, the consequences fall upon the image, that generative stronghold where certainty and doubt coexist in prolonged tension. Faced with this dilemma, Brines's works lead to another question that is never resolved: humans or beasts?

Caracas, September 2010

The Generation That Paints

Todo en Domingo / El Nacional, 13 September 2009. Cover and report, pp. 26-34.
Text: José Roberto Coppola. Photographs: Julio Osorio.
English translation prepared for the artist's archive. The Spanish original remains the reference.

The Generation of the Canvas

They are under forty. They belong to a talented generation of Venezuelan artists who have chosen the canvas. Todo en Domingo consulted a panel of thirty respected art specialists - curators, critics, restorers, researchers and gallerists - asking them to name the five painters with the greatest promise. From their studios, those chosen by majority vote discuss the lasting traces of their brushstrokes.

The Watchful Gaze of a Troop of Imaginary Friends
Starsky Brines (32, Caracas)

He is never alone in his studio. Nor is the place empty when he leaves. On the canvases on the wall, in the small paintings stacked on shelves, on painted sheets lost beneath piles of things, are his guardians: sinister and amusing, dangerous and innocent characters who are his companions, his rescuers, his confidants and, above all, his friends. In his studio, painter Starsky Brines takes out a notebook and reads a sentence he wrote: 'They are my protective army, which I created as an impenetrable shield and which, now that I am an adult, remains by my side as we face life together.' He says that only recently did he accept and understand who they were, as if they had finally revealed their great secret. 'I am still discovering what and who they are. In personal circumstances, they lead me to deeper reflections. But I am aware that they come from a solitary childhood.' Yet he was never alone, even if he thought he was.

The floor is covered in the traces of many works; the studio is filled with untidy pots of paint. The canvases hanging on the walls reveal, through aggressive strokes like knife slashes, Brines's friends, whom he calls 'the hybridisation of beast and human'. They seem to have emerged from a television screen that exists only in his mind: a cross between urban beings and cartoon characters. 'The result connects you with a child self,' says the painter, who grew up in Maturín although he was born in Caracas, studied at the Armando Reverón institute and won second prize at the eighth Cantv Jóvenes con FIA salon in 2005. He makes clear that his work is not children's art. 'For me, they are self-portraits of human beings with the conflicts of existence.' They reflect many souls and his own inner arguments. 'Sometimes you resemble that, and that gets under your skin. There is black humour in my paintings, but it is not literal.'

'When I start painting, I make marks. I am in a meditative state; I become still, enter a trance, feel the touch and act. Sometimes I like playing with accident: staining the canvas, turning it around, connecting it with colours. There is paint, there is matter, and I connect with it.' That is how he approaches canvases, working on the floor or the wall with long strokes, dripping colours and flinging brushstrokes. As Brines speaks, his gaze drifts into the 'total relationship with everything' that he leaves in his painting. 'When I paint, it is less about thinking than about feeling within the painting. Thinking is very difficult. When I paint it is magic; if I think, I lose time. Painting makes you live with all your senses.' And out come Brines's characters, looking at you from the canvas, challenging and confronting you. 'They are imaginary friends I created as a protective barrier, and they have helped me through life.'

HAVE YOU CRIED WHILE PAINTING A PICTURE?
'I have painted while crying, but I have not cried over my paintings. In painting I try to leave everything behind, to let things go and be without them the next day. I try to carry on with my life without many of those things I have left there.'

Archive note: this document reproduces the introduction and the section devoted to Starsky Brines preserved in the artist's archive; it is not the complete report on all five painters.

(…) if the poet appears to place himself within the realm of ordinary reality (…) he then adopts all the conditions that govern the emergence of the uncanny in real life, and whatever has that character in lived experience will also have it in fiction. (…) In a sense, he then abandons us to the superstition we thought we had overcome; he deceives us by promising everyday reality, only to step outside it. We react to his fictions as we would to our own experiences; by the time we become aware of the deception, it is already too late, for the poet has achieved his purpose (…)

Sigmund Freud

According to Sigmund Freud, in his study of the various manifestations of the uncanny through an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's story The Sandman, this state is a kind of phenomenon that affects and renders strange things that have long been known and familiar: elements we have left behind and whose emotional impulses have been repressed over the course of our lives. Repression transforms these hidden parts of the self into anxiety, causing them to accumulate; they tend to return to us suddenly, unsettling everything we believed we had overcome.

For the psychoanalyst, the materialization or emergence of the uncanny in a work of art has to do with the poet's ability to position himself within ordinary reality and carry these traits from everyday life into fiction, setting in motion a displacement that will subsequently recur in the viewer's experience. In Starsky Brines's case, this mechanism could be said to be one of the central elements of his painting. His ambiguous characters, both in drawings and on canvas, appear before us as if they belonged to a world we all know, suddenly thrown out of alignment by the artist's intervention. Strange presences, sombre dolls, beings that are half animal and half human, ambiguous women, smiling children, subtle beasts, texts, poems, written marks and objects constantly travel along the two-way street he develops in his works: a fantastic cartography in which the strange and the familiar overlap, giving rise to figures that are as close to us as they are alien.

For Brines, this world is a highly particular, infinite population: an urban bestiary as intimate as it is collective, which he has been gathering for many years and which seems constantly to assail him. His images carry the living traces of a personal memory that moves from dolls and childhood recollections through comic-book culture and the characteristic iconography of mass media: symbols, stereotypes, moments, forms and relationships that also feel familiar to us because they constitute the everyday fabric of our compulsive contemporary lives. In his work, formats, techniques and materials intensify these visual deviations. Each figure functions as an assembly of fragments, suggestions and gestures that will take shape in the viewer's own hidden recesses.

Through this accumulation of formal and conceptual ruptures, which not only inspire the emergence of his characters but also shape the movement of every mark across the canvas, the artist ultimately confronts us with a world in which, as Freud might say, the strange, the odd and the displaced are suddenly affirmed and celebrated. Almost as if it were a game, he opens a path for the presence of the uncanny: works that momentarily deconstruct themselves before coming alive again, pieces overflowing with public and private stories, visual fractures fluctuating among the ghostly flashes of a subterranean plot, the persistence of a lost path along which the artist, expelling and recycling his own fears, offers us a hidden truth of which we are all a part.

Lorena González

In times when art’s prophetic vocation has all but disappeared and uniformity threatens to prevail, a number of young painters emerge who renew our faith in painting, in pictorial creation, in the spirit of freedom. This is the best thing that can happen to a fractured society. Juan Carlos Palenzuela

With these words Juan Carlos Palenzuela concluded his text on the painter Starsky Brines, written for the artist’s first solo exhibition in 2006 at Galería Spacio-Zero, which no longer has a physical space. Three years have passed since then. Brines’s work continues its battles within a society as fractured, dissimilar, heterogeneous and unpredictable as the one described by the critic, who has also since passed away. Yet these troubled territories are no obstacle for the artist. On the contrary, it is precisely these difficult, arid passages that command his attention: a shifting place where the many events that arrive at the ‘hour’ of his painting erupt and take shape. Strange, hybrid, fantastic beings; incisive, playful, vaporous strokes; suggestive silhouettes, cultural references and symbolic appropriations evoke a childish, ironic bestiary of his own—a bestiary as personal as it is collective.

Characters and feelings that are difficult to share have always coexisted in Starsky Brines’s work: invading presences that, like ruins of our shifting visual culture, leap from the canvas, awaken in intimacy and stir in memory. In this pictorial game, borrowed iconographies are transmuted: magazine images, altered record covers, silhouettes of celebrated artworks, fabric samples, visual debris, words, fragments, gestures, letters and signs suddenly invade the space of the paper, the solemnity of the canvas.

Normally we see only one version of this journey: the one offered by our final encounter with the artist’s work. For this exhibition, however, we wanted to multiply the connections of this experience, disrupt it and make it visible. In a city as variable and diffuse as the one we inhabit today, the artist decided to bring his studio into the exhibition space, to invade the gallery while, himself invaded by his characters during the week before the opening, he takes up the surrounding supports—glass, walls, paper, canvas and floors—to produce the exhibited work in situ.

The photographer Rafael Serrano accompanies him, his camera also invading Brines’s journey, interpreting the painter’s action and translating it. He records the temperatures of the process so that his images reveal the hidden sequences of that particular grammar of painting, somehow suspending ‘that’ which breathes only in the solitude of the studio. The two thus become intertwined in the performative act of working before one another: physical bodies invaded by the trance of an unrepeatable journey, works unfolding amid—and through—the powerful uniformities, particular fractures and sustained disappearances of our techno-global world.

María Elena Ramos: Two of the works you sent me have a completely different existence: En el patio de las apariciones and La mirona insistente. Their only affinity with the characters in other works lies in their red, clown-like noses, but here these seem more like a superimposed disguise, even with a visible little thread suggesting a ‘mask’. Two things stand out: interpreting works and canons of the past, with their mixture of still life and portraiture, a certain realistic iconography and a symbolic ordering of space; and intervening in those canons, somewhat mocking old ideals of beauty. Are these two isolated works or part of a larger series? Please expand a little on these points.

Starsky Brines: I did not set out to mock the canons of beauty of the period in which the work was made; it has been an encounter. I have related to classical works in a way other than passive contemplation, seeking a form of action that allows a practical approach to the original creator’s vision. In any case, I do not reject the freedom that contemporaneity allows me. I welcome these readings: they speak of the vitality of images. I seek to create other readings from images that belong to us.

The idea of intervening, of taking possession of an image, has always captivated me. With Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, I think the opposite happened: she took possession of me. One day I could no longer resist and painted her in an attempt to discover some of her mystery. I was already working with red dots and zoomorphic images. Once I had finished the image, I had no choice but to intervene in it. This was the beginning of a series, still not very extensive, in which I shape and disrupt that apparent beauty through resources from the world I have been developing.

I would like to go further into the idea of the mask you mention. Like much of what I do, neither the mask nor the clown-like noses were intentional at first. They result from a great curiosity to see what happens if one does this or that. The point is to make it tangible, and this is how these codes begin to appear. First I painted animals, which gradually stood upright until becoming those ambiguous beings, somewhere between comics, clowns and beasts. From them I take elements that I lend to these old images as a kind of collage, disrupting their identity and creating a metaphor for our contemporary world—or, frankly, for human beings, who have always hidden behind appearances.

GALERÍA FERNANDO PRADILLA

C/ Claudio Coello, 20 — Tel. (34) 91 575 48 04 — Fax (34) 91 577 69 07 — Madrid 28001 — Spain

PRESS RELEASE

Exhibition: Starsky Brines, Caso Fortuito

December 3, 2009 – January 9, 2010

Starsky Brines (Caracas, 1977) presents his second solo exhibition at Galería Fernando Pradilla. A broad selection of drawings and paintings recently produced by the artist comes together in this exhibition, entitled Caso Fortuito, on view until January 9, 2010.

Starsky Brines's work seems to challenge our established anthropomorphic notions. His handling of form in creating the beings that inhabit his paintings prevents us from determining whether they are animals endowed with human traits and qualities or precisely the reverse. His characters seem obsessed by a persistent sense of hybridity and complementarity, a zoomorphic drive that transmutes appearances and results in a new species: beast-like and humanized at once. His creatures partake of this dual, complementary identity, which fragments and unifies them within a narrative of extravagant stories and unexpected visual relationships. Innocence and mischief, circumspection and informality, reproach and approval find their way into the interpretations through which this young artist metamorphoses everyday life.

With his customary artistic freedom, Starsky Brines unfolds a world of surprising beings and situations, in which humour, mockery, sarcasm and caricature allow him to contextualize the universe of his little human monsters. These are dynamic, narrative works with ingenious, ironic titles, their colourful, vigorous brushstrokes structuring a language defined by freshness, a keen sense of humour and a remarkable capacity for formal synthesis.

Starsky Brines holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón in Caracas. Since the late 1990s, he has presented his work in a variety of national and international venues. His work has earned wide recognition, reflected in recent participation in international fairs and exhibitions, where it has met with considerable success and acceptance among critics and the public. Since his first solo exhibition in Madrid, his work has made its way into European, Latin American and other international exhibition spaces, appearing in group exhibitions in cities including Basel, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Santander, Miami, Madrid and Seoul. In recent years, his work has also received several awards and distinctions, notably Second Prize at the VIII Salón CANTV Jóvenes con FIA: Miradas Abiertas (Caracas, 2005); the Juan Lovera Grand Prize at the XXXIII Salón Municipal de Artes Visuales (Caracas, 2004); an Honourable Mention at the XXIII Salón de Pintura del Ateneo de Carúpano (Sucre, 2003); and the Best Painting Award at the VII Salón Regional de Jóvenes Artistas, Puerto La Cruz (Anzoátegui, 2003).

Tania Iglesias

November 2009

Beings with faces that reveal their exterior and interior, children playing with a bicycle, animal-men or plant-men: contained within the space of nothing and everything, they remain in the silence of the stone that allows them to identify themselves stealthily. Wishing to be the beginning of something about to happen in the present, they inhabit a magical time, appearing in a painting rooted in the world, rooted in a reality both actual and imagined. It is the violence of a body seeking to join the person who approaches it expectantly, to stir an existence charged with the warrior's torches; a warrior who one day decided to leave his parents' home in a provincial city and settle in the chaos of the great capital. Caracas, in its pursuit of modernity, has burned its footsteps into concrete, yet continues to flourish in the greenery of its trees and the marvellous atmosphere of the Magic Mountain that protects a generous people. Surrounded by this urban architecture, which struggles against the great trees concealing its façades, Starsky Brines began his path as a painter.

In explaining his painting, Starsky Brines says that it expresses images he has stored in his memory, images from several childhood worlds that he wishes to reconcile with the world he has encountered as an adult determined to express himself through painting. Looking at it, one finds a strange joy enveloped in cries and sinister atmospheres that, paradoxically, address a dramatic question to the universe. In his study of the recent history of painting, the young Starsky discovers the extravagances of the transavantgarde of the eighties, which in turn drew upon the violence of European neo-expressionism, New York graffiti and the urban murals of so many cities that often seem so distant, but also upon Latin American New Figuration, exemplified by the painting of Jacobo Borges in Venezuela, or Luis Felipe Noé and Ernesto Deira in Argentina, to name only a few. As he declares, he makes painting, and his love of painting for its own sake, into a visual expression subject to the laws of human growth and to a certain non-rational poetics governed by artistic and human laws. His need is to establish a relationship between the human being and the universe, without the mediation of an external object.

It is evident that this painting does not call into question the relationship between image and reality. His personal figuration, dismembered by forceful marks and patches of aggressive colour, creates a violent realism, ultimately determined by the way the artist selects and transposes his vision to occupy a re-presentational space of that same image. On the support, whether paper or canvas, its destiny clearly intersects with others. Colour with a life of its own, re-energized by the figurative impulse, sometimes modulated through transparency and at other times emphasized by long, thick strokes, leads him, in artistic terms, toward freedom in execution and toward a form that he ultimately sublimates through chromatic stridency, dynamic and elastic, until these elements transform themselves across the plane. The artist's skill lies in making them move and presenting them as tangible through the reconstruction of reality, whether in a portrait, as in the paintings La niña de película and mi jeva mixta, for example, or in children's play, as in Yo que estuve esperando, mirando.

One subject to address in Brines's painting is the concept of beauty, a rather ambiguous one, since his images generate tenderness and aggression simultaneously, as in other tendencies where figuration falls outside traditional canons of beauty. It is also governed by the artist's sensibility and his desire to approach art through a love of painting, as though it were the childhood game he had always wished to play and can now realize with a universal and collective character. In this sense, what is defined here as figurative carries a meaning grounded in personal experiences, memories and concerns about the surrounding environment and its influence on individuals. The gestural act of constructing this image through colour alone, with its expressive as well as symbolic force, and the thick, nervous, vibrant, even violent mark, carries the considerable weight of meaning communicated to the viewer through its visual impact and the complex compositional planes on which it is expressed.

Starsky Brines sets down in writing what he feels emotionally and seeks conceptually through his painting:

… My painting is nourished primarily by my love of the act of painting. I involve resources such as the stain, the line and immediacy, turning everything into the act of making and perceiving matter as a muscle that generates movement in synchrony with my body, my hands, my feet, my skin and my mind. Each part of me, together with matter, becomes a bridge conducting energy that flows onto the support to make way for the pictorial event …

This statement places him in an essentially gestural-expressionist direction. Furthermore, the active visual qualities assimilate the temporal dimension of lived experience within a framework of duration, combining almost obsessive dreams with violent inflections in the structuring of the image. This emerges from the artist's surrender to the creative act, with the active participation of his arm, his body and his heart, commanded in battle by the orders sent by the brain.

Bélgica Rodríguez

Caracas, May 2008

Recycling and drawing upon history are signs of the times. Starsky Brines is a painter of a new generation, the one that emerged in a salon in 2003, without a manifesto or any memorable fanfare. They simply took their places in an exhibition where dozens of young exhibitors usually crowd together, and on that occasion, among so many, a shared affinity asserted itself: figurative painting, urban iconography, an interest in recycled material and in the non-discursive.

The twentieth century has been regarded as a time that exalted chaos, aesthetic audacity and challenges to the imagination and to the meanings of art. How significant it is that, at the beginning of a new millennium, an artist should open his first solo exhibition with a painting retrieved from the rubbish. An insignificant painting, kitsch and, to top it all, enormous. A landscape—significantly—a pretentious one. Properly framed and also thoroughly daubed over. A painting of mixtures, ironies and baseness. A painting that recalls observations in Alain Severe's L'Art modeste. A painting that situates us within postmodernity.

This generation finds its point of convergence in the classrooms of the Instituto Reverón in Caracas. As far as I can understand, there they learned that the artist's first condition lies in individual freedom. That atmosphere can be felt while walking through its corridors, studios and classrooms. At a time of constraints and serious difficulties for art education in Venezuela—for the country, let us say—the Instituto Reverón has stood for openness, independence and daring.

A painter, and a figurative painter, Brines places an imaginary subject at the centre of the pictorial space: solitary, imposing, simple. This element might originate in comics or in certain emblematic images of mass culture, with no other affiliation than pictorial creation. His work can be recognized by its large formats and its long sequences of very small series; the imaginary face, the interest in material and colour, and a certain writing within the space of painting itself. One strand of the modern-art tradition is deformation, which in this painter mingles with a chromatic treatment through which the support seems to breathe.

With Brines comes a reaffirmation of the figurative tradition in contemporary Venezuelan painting. His image is concentrated in a scene. A figure without a repertoire. His colour tends toward the primary, and through it he establishes the sense of drawing. His is a painting upon which the name “Caracas” is written, nothing more: a somewhat undefined figure, a reclining body, a human bird-creature, a depersonalized feature clinging to its strange human condition. A painting of unsettling backgrounds and figures that might evoke the painting-for-painting's-sake of the eighties. Its iconic reference, although partly concealed, speaks of its photographic origins.

At a time when art's prophetic vocation has all but disappeared and uniformity threatens to prevail, a number of young painters emerge who renew faith in painting, in pictorial creation and in the spirit of freedom. This is the best thing that can happen to a fractured society.

Juan Carlos Palenzuela

Starsky Brines, or an Essay on Beasts That Die of Love

Plátano Verde, 2005.
Text: Néstor Luis Cedeño Lima. Photographs: Gustavo Marcano.
English translation prepared for the artist's archive. The Spanish original remains the reference.

Visiting Starsky's home on Avenida San Martín is like entering the personal labyrinth of an urban miniaturist who embraces his hybridity and recalls, with something of a storybook nostalgia, a childhood of fruit trees, rooftops and ancestral homes. Salsa brava, Franco de Vita and Juan Gabriel are playing, and Rocco - an eighty-kilogram boxer - greets us at the door with an inquisitive look, wondering whether we will decipher the keys to Starsky's bestiary or find our way out of the labyrinth of forms and oil beasts howling beneath the streets.

'Painting is destroying what has already been established. I never try to make a painting, but a piece of life.' - Karel Appel

ALL GAMES, THE GAME

As we enter, we cannot help noticing the walls covered in his works, doors transformed by his hybrid figures, an old sewing machine that belonged to his mother turned into painting, the bathroom fittings bearing figures, and tables full of portraits. It resembles a hieroglyphic code through which the artist remakes his surroundings, becoming a creator upon creation. His emotional bond with objects intensifies that relationship. His painting has an immediacy of line coupled with an irreverent approach to the act of painting. The clown noses in certain portraits support our reading.

- Part of your exploration involves deliberately intervening in reality, not only on canvas but also on domestic objects and even in your own home. Where does that relationship come from?

It began because materials were not easy for me to obtain, so I started experimenting with whatever was available. Through that relationship with materials, you develop a kind of knack and search within the openings that present themselves. I think freedom plays an important role; that sense of mischief matters a great deal in the work, asking yourself: why not? When I paint on an object, I make it mine, transform it and give it another meaning, another identity.

- You intervene in your immediate surroundings, your everyday reality, your family space, and at the same time that reconstructs you. Could painting be understood as a utopia that transforms reality?

I believe in other things; I believe in Utopia. Those things make me dream and make life better. I know reality is easy, but I want a more fucking amazing one. Play is very important in my work: mischief, changing things, putting a clown nose on a portrait. Here is a story: I recently sold a piece, and when I met the buyer I asked why he had bought it. He said: because it made me laugh.

THE DREAMS OF REASON

We return to utopia on the apartment balcony. Below, the avenue lets out concrete cries; in the distance the market breathes colours unexpected amid so much asphalt and howling. We discuss the titles of his paintings - Mañana cuando amanezca; Te Amo, El Sol no lo pude ver - and he admits that many come from songs on his portable radio, a way of holding onto the emotional moment in which they were conceived. He speaks about his life:

- My painting begins with my immediate personal experience. My imagination contains my childhood, my move from Maturín to Caracas, my family, my ten-year relationship: all of that makes up my world.

- I think about the idea of multiple meanings in art. Art that reaches different spaces and sends meanings in different directions. Art capable of connecting with human beings. Today people do not believe in a damn thing, and I think we should recover utopia.

THE MEMORY OF BEASTS

The animal figure is fundamental to Brines's work. Zoomorphic figures dissolve in the rapid, almost shouted strokes he often uses, revealing the basic questions the painter confronts as a human being: solitude, the city as prison, displacement and belonging, lost paradises. The memory of beasts that never stop dreaming.

- The titles of your images suggest a narrative or poetic quality running through your paintings.

Of course. That relates to one of my most important subjects: Memory. I was telling you earlier about my childhood of rooftops, courtyards, games and storybook things. Childhood was a wonder. That is where all the imagery comes from that I later bring to painting in different ways. I think the image somehow preserves that space.

- What role do animals play in your work?

My relationship with the animal figure has always seemed interesting, revealing and instinctive. Look at a child's relationship with an animal: entirely instinctive and natural. In my case, when you bring that image into the city, the work's meanings expand.

- Does the animal become a mirror at that point?

Without a doubt, I am the animal.

PROFILE

Starsky Brines (1977). Historical website: www.starsky.com.ve.
Influences: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Karel Appel, Ernesto León, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Víctor Hugo Irazábal.
Imagery: beasts, family portraits, marks, childhood, clowns.

Key ideas: intervening in objective and accessory reality to imbue it with a personal world; seeking to recover a utopian space, the lost paradise of childhood; painting as play; memory as a way of apprehending reality; narrative in the works; the beast as a symbol of personal freedom and an instinctive relationship with the universe. A dialectic between the domestic animal - colours, kinship, childhood, rural life - and the wild beast - black, marks, oil, rupture, city, rust, solitude. The beast-human hybrid. A cathartic, intimate approach. Haematopoiesis.

Self-declaration: 'A sustained effort to see something. A few colours on a support that grow enormous, become truth. Fail a thousand times, begin again, without certainty, but keep painting. Eyes swollen from looking. Eyes extended within. A little clumsiness to avoid the sin of ignorance.'

Recognitions, as listed in the original interview:
Juan Lovera Prize, XXXIII Municipal Visual Arts Salon Juan Lovera, Caracas, 2004.
Honourable Mention, XXIII Salón de Carúpano, Ateneo de Carúpano, Sucre, 2003.
Best Painting Award, VII Regional Salon of Young Artists, Puerto La Cruz, Anzoátegui, 2003.

Archive note: the original interview lists the Carúpano distinction as an Honourable Mention. The 2003 exhibition catalogue supplied by the artist identifies it as a Special Mention (Mención Especial); the current CV uses that documented designation. The private street address has been omitted in this public edition.

The need to draw, to make marks, to scribble, to interpret the external reality surrounding us or the internal reality living in our minds is as old as humanity itself. Since the earliest times, human beings have felt the need to imagine and to draw what they imagine in order to understand the world or communicate it to others. Drawing is a language. It is a sensitive activity deeply identified with human beings. As long as people feel the need to use that language to signify and communicate, drawing will continue.

People draw for different reasons. We draw to learn to see, or to make visible what only we can see or think. This is why Joseph Beuys maintained that “drawing is thinking.” Drawing is immediate thought, drawing upon the essentials of graphic language to express an organized reality directly: a whole with the minimum of means.

It should be pointed out that drawing is an intention more than an action. One can draw without using traditional drawing materials: paper, charcoal, pencil and so on. Today, those who draw explore new materials, freeing themselves from the traditional support and the frame. In many cases, drawing has become more installation-based, open to real and digital space, and readily assimilates aspects of conceptual art. Through an interactive process, drawing expands, establishing dialogues with other genres, although speaking of genres is difficult today. Such is the case with the series of images through which Starsky Brines is invited into our Galería de Papel: a group of works produced by the intervention of gesture, mark and line upon the photographic image.

Starsky Brines has developed an entire personal imagery, as a painter as well as a draughtsman, through the weight of the animal presence in his work. This forms a kind of personal bestiary in which a series of zoomorphic images unfolds, speaking to us of the hybridization of beast and human. His mark yields to an inner force that does not know where it is going, drinking from dark depths until it finally allows an archetypal world to burst forth violently, connecting us directly with our animal origins.

His animals emerge from a mixture of civilization and barbarism. We should not forget that art is a form of knowledge, a reflection of life, and that the artist is a thinker about reality, an investigator of the external world whose material or immaterial propositions help us grasp how the social, cultural and emotional events we live through touch our inner fibres and affect our being. Through his work, Starsky speaks to us about the conditions of human existence in contemporary society. His art possesses a significant and communicative power through which we see ourselves reflected as beasts in a world charged with a high degree of violence and intolerance.

“Inspired by my experiences of nature and the city,” Starsky observes, “I use various resources and supports bearing images already made by someone else. Such is the case with photography, for within photographs lives a memory that speaks of another time, another way of seeing and an intention different from my own. A feeling of not belonging continues to prevail in my work, which I translate into new images of my own. They trigger a discourse from which ambiguity emerges. From nature, violently, I draw out the animal to evoke the various fragments that live in the memory and everyday life of the urban human being.”

Víctor Hugo Irazábal

Caracas, 2004

Published in Comunicación magazine