Hello Juan Jose. Please tell us something about your career.
I’m an abstract, geometric, hard-edge painter, working on canvas, wood panels, and paper. My paintings are fueled by my love of abstraction which I have been interested in from a very young age. The practice of making them has involved experimenting with many schools of art and diverse art movements from the early 1900s to the present.
My work has been evolving and transforming over a number of years and has fluctuated back and forth among different ideas, all of them in the abstract model. During this period of discovery, my main areas of interest became the Concrete, Minimalist, Reductive, Geometric, and Hard Edge Schools.
How do you work?
I experiment with color juxtaposition, space, and rhythm often listening to music ranging from the jazz singer Billie Holiday, to contemporary jazz piano, disco, and even House dance music. Although I’m what you might call a mature artist, my spirit is young. I relate to painting as if it were a dance, trying to understand new steps between color and geometry. There are never any hints of gestures or marks in my work.
The paintings are distilled, organized, elegant. I often work in pairs and I have a recurring series called Concrete Compositions based on the theories of Theo van Doesburg who in 1930 described painting that should refer to nothing other than itself: I work intuitively and never work from drawings or studies. One painting influences the other. I put one color down and the next color is a response to the previous. If it doesn’t work, the paint is scraped down and overpainted, but I never reveal any traces. My process is slow but deliberate until I find the perfect balance in the composition that I’m working on.
How do you define your personal style?
I’ve never been a believer in having a particular “style” or gimmick and doing that for 40 years. My paintings are abstract compositions using the vocabulary of Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Minimalism, Hard Edge painting, and Geometric Abstraction. The paintings are about structure, surface, precision, paint as paint, ambiguity, intuition, improvisation, graphics, signage, design, and coherent organization.
All of this information is re-arranged and re-appropriated into new interpretations, conceptual hybrids, and juxtapositions. My painting technique involves a mixture of acrylic paint, matte medium, and gesso on canvas, paper, or wood, giving the work a matte flat finish similar to gouache paint, creating the great depth of color that I prefer. I then finish the work with a couple of coats of satin varnish which transforms the matte colors to a brilliant opaqueness.
Do you have specific goals concerning your work as an artist?
My intentions are to force a new dialogue inherent to abstraction that started in the early 1900s and continues to be relevant to this day. I hope that when a viewer sees my work, they get a feeling of simplicity, harmony, order, and rhythm. I want to continue to paint and build my body of work. I would like to expand the number of collectors who want to add my work to their collections. And I would certainly look forward to more opportunities to exhibit.
What does it mean to you to be an artist?
Being an artist to me is the same as breathing. You have to do it or you will not exist. I paint because I have to. I’m at the age where I don’t depend on sales to subsist, but I enjoy the satisfaction when someone gets what I’m doing and wants to purchase it. My paintings are in many private collections across the U.S. and Europe. One of my recent sales went to a collector in The Netherlands. It took three months to arrive because of the delays in shipping due to the CoVid pandemic.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell the readers?
No, I think I’ve said enough and I want to thank hardedger for the feature.
Many thanks Juan Jose.
Artist page
Web: juanjosehoyosquiles.com
Instagram: @juanjosehoyosquiles
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