REBEL COMMUNIQUÉ
This exhibition of works named "Rebels" at Casa Navegante acknowledges that contemporary painting has inherited from its modernist past and the emergence of conceptual art the conviction that drives each artist to take a strong stance on the act of painting and its infinite possibilities.
Iván Heredia, the author of the exhibition, presents himself as a painter capable of understanding that a painting is much more than a tradition, a craft, or the experience of aesthetically arranging pigments on a surface. His pieces remind the viewer that a painting is, above all, the representation of one or several ideas about painting itself.
A painting is always and inevitably autotelic; for this reason, the works have been executed with special attention to their execution. Textures, marks, sweeps, glazes, and numerous expressive effects or resources are the signs arranged to invariably tell us interesting things about the pictorial phenomenon.
The painter declares his rebellion in two fundamental directions:
First, he thematizes in his figurative works several subjects who have played rebellious roles in various fields of action, such as social protest, armed struggles, gender emancipation, etc.
Second, he develops a series of mostly abstract works where he surprises with the maturity of an authentic pictorial search, which rebels against the prevailing popular taste in his context and transcends the expectations usually held for a creator, whose dedication to painting is very recent.
Amidst so many styles, legacies, and media that converge today, Iván Heredia bets on a painting that reveals itself, to the attentive eye, as a lesson in pictorial anatomy, where he allows us to see the causes of the things painted in his endeavor to grasp a world of expressive possibilities.
Fidel Castro Cabello. Bucaramanga, December 8, 2022.
Remembering the past to explain the present is a fascinating endeavor. It's interesting to observe the contradictory ways in which history is remembered, often biased depending on who tells it and their interests. An image is more impartial, and painting has been a balm against forgetting. Through painting, I seek to understand how certain pivotal moments affect us.
In my work, I approach figures in an iconic manner, intrigued by their perception as stereotypes. With details of expressionism, realism, figuration, and abstraction, much like in dreams or memories.