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Artist Statement

I recently conceived of two new bodies of work, Pandemic Portraits and I Can’t Breathe, both inspired by the challenging social and political events we have experienced in the last year and a half. My work uses painting and printmaking processes, reassembling fragments of lived moments in order to reinvent the new reality through the finished work of art and, to do so, summons memory and dreams, both real and imagined. Some of the paintings in the Pandemic Portraits series are created in digital layers, combining different hand painted surfaces that have been scanned and printed again on a different material, such as aluminum dibond, and then painted again. I combine painted elements such as an oil painting portrait on panel with a separate painted polyester silk and a photographed grid of disposable masks, in order to achieve the desired effect that records the lived experience combined with experimentation. In addition, I focus on visual aspects (transparency, color saturation, luminosity, forms, etc.), and combine them in such a way that the separation of form and content become inseparable.

www.juliovaldez.com