I shop as an artistic practice. What I like about the things I buy is their attitude. Today, everything is susceptible to
reproduction and is over-aestheticized. The allure of imagery and objects is what blindfolds us not only in public but in
private as well. My work looks like something from now, something commercial, like a poster or a postcard, cold, playful,
and attractive at first sigh. I am interested in ambivalence and contradiction.
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I talk about the world in a paradoxical way. I choose images from mass culture to talk about politics, art, painting, cultural
issues, taste, the material world, pleasure, power, sexuality, gender and the role of the artist’s external life in the larger
culture. I give the viewer an active role and contrast what they see with their own experiences and preconceptions.

I’m interested in images and how they are a construction, in cosmetics instead of aesthetics, in the nature of all of these
issues as images. By adding more and more layers, I distort what is already distorted. If the world so twisted at times, why
not view it with a little bit of humor? I’m able to make jokes without smiling.

The very notion of art is determined by decisions you don’t make, this becomes more evident if you are not from the Northern
Hemisphere, the limitations to make decolonized decisions in the art field, show us that there is no way to alter the system
or to be outside the system. Once assimilated the impossibility to make truly decolonized art.
I explore these difficult matters not in order to solve them, but to implicitly highlight their deep entanglement with social
relations of power and exploitation.

As an artist I feel that I need to understand what my place is in history and in the institutional system of production, the
contemporary economic system in other words. As Latin Americans we understand our condition in external terms, so it is
a problem of representation. We can only use the media of representation that are available, and to use and question the
media of representation you are already making a political decision. What are the possibilities of the medium? It is hard to
capture a subject through image, to show the content of the representation but the tools of representation itself. I try to bring
everything to the surface and make it explicit. Remember: too much sugar could take off your legs.

Juan Camilo Guzmán loves tennis. He works with mixed media as a medium and as a subject as well. His interests include
art history and theory, painting, philosophy, design, advertisement and the role of the artist in the material world. He was
born in Bogotá, Colombia where he lived until 2014. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship. He has participated in several group exhibitions and
artistic residencies in Colombia and the United States in prestigious showcases such as the Chicago Artists Coalition and
Hyde Park art Center in Chicago, and the Sala de Exposiciones Cafam in Bogotá. The Exhibition promoted by Societa
Dante Alighieri is his first show in Italy.