Creating images that awaken that language of the unconscious is where the foundation of my work lies. I have always been intrigued by the way some images affect me, and how I react to them.
At the end of the creative process there is the expectation of making work capable of moving the viewer. Allowing them to see something that they were not apprised of. Silently making them an accomplice in the web where their turmoil and perception forces them to reflect whether they have become the spider or the prey.
The work of Jorge Julián Aristizábal is difficult to classify due to its deliberate technical and stylistic diversity. The artist himself has af rmed that “he avoids cultivating a style or a de nite form of expression at any cost,” since, for him, reproducing a style, whatever that might be, would mean cheating life itself, which is in a constant change. It would mean “cutting the roots and creating the death” of his own work and way of thinking. Perhaps the only constant in his work is his insistence on drawing, which has had a dominant role in the Colombian art world of the past decade.
After a formative period in the United States and Europe, de ned by a trans-avant-garde approach and a return to painting characteristic of the 1980s art world, Aristizábal nally came home to his native Medellín. At that time, he was creating large-format paintings of interiors and trans gured objects, tense atmospheres that, during a time of enthusiastic appropriation, recalled the psycho- analytic preoccupation of surrealist painting.
Years later he moved to London and continued his stud- ies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The exploration of a at and concise guration distilled from his pho- tographic sources and other genres, forming groups of silhouettes and plain and homogeneous colors, along with the dry and ironic humor characteristic of the English-speaking world, are impressions of this forma- tive context that still persist in his oeuvre today.
If there is a guiding thread in his abundant collection of pictorial and graphic works, it possibly is the use (or, to be more exact, mimethic use) of certain types of guration—realistic, naturalistic, descriptive, decorative, illustrative, caricature-like, naïve—as a camou age for his sustained, biting criticism of double moral stan- dards and corruption, of careerism and its institution- alized manifestations.
He is an artist who is always attentive to language games: those that violently inscribe the dominant ideologies on the body, as well as those that seek to escape this violence. Aristizábal represents these spoken-word games; the titles and inscriptions that proliferate in his graphic work strongly evoke the oral culture of the cities in which he has lived.
For this reason, he does not elide but rather magni es the signs of provincialism and local color in his iconographic and discursive sources. This quality turns his work into a kind of colloquial and casual conversation, serious at times, at times relaxed, but always illuminated by a timid and ruthless sense of humor.
Of course, Aristizábal also captures these language games in the world of visual culture, where he uses diverse visual archives ranging from everyday items such as the press and collectible stickers (graphic reports, design, advertising), popular murals, and bulletin boards in schools, to the most hidden sources of his memory and imagination.
Other elements that articulate Aristizábal’s oeuvre are eroticism and sexuality. The constant transposition of humanity and animality in his works merges the forces of instinct and desire with common sense and the pulses that ow through it, veiled but never tamed.
