I buy objects, I print, I do installation and I paint.

What I like about the things I buy is its attitude; I’m interested in shopping as an artistic practice. Today, everything is susceptible to reproduction and is over-aestheticized; Allure of imagery and objects is what blindfolds us, not just in public spaces but in private as well. The production line, the market, commodities, the advertisement and all the design and display decisions in general are interesting to me. For this reason, I propose that my work, instead of avoiding the dilution of itself onto an uncertain path, will use what is attractive to the masses and me as a part of the attraction. By adding more and more layers, I distort something that is already distorted. If the world is so twisted sometimes, why not view it with a little bit of humor? I’m able to make jokes without smiling… and I prefer to use that instead of aggression.

I analyze, I observe, I collect and I frame. I’m interested in painting for its tradition and how it is still effective and has a great importance in the art world, market and in general, a lot of people think that art is just painting; I’m interested in that. I thought about how I paint but that’s not the main point. It doesn’t matter if I’m the painter or if I hire someone. My work must look like something that is going on now, something commercial, for example a poster or a post card, directly. They should look impersonal but I am really present in the work, cold and playful, with no soul but maybe attractive at first sight. All is very subjective anyway. I’m interested in contradiction, ambiguity and ambivalence. It can look that I am full of myself and that everything is about me, but I am also searching for an identity that is definitely displaced. (It’s a state of irony.) REMOVE?

The very notion of art is determined by decisions you don’t make; it is impossible to make truly “decolonized” art, that’s more evident if you are not from the north hemisphere. As a Latin American artist I’m interested in images and how they are a construction. In cosmetics instead of aesthetics, the nature of all these issues as images. I’m not going to talk about hunger, for example, because I can’t and the people who live their lives struggling to survive can’t neither, they perceive themselves through a very complex production of images about their own reality. We don’t have the tools and I don’t want to victimize anyone. In this case, I’m more interested on the images of “hunger” we have in the general imagination. There is a double (or more) distance to distort a distorted reality.

(What is my relationship to all of this or how the women are treated in the contemporary “civilized” culture? Those are questions that could be implied in an image of a “pretty” girl and the relationship to a short text all framed in bright orange and removed from a specific context.) REMOVE?

The objects are new objects that didn’t develop an “aura” and are worthless now. Probably garbage The objects lifespan is short, from the shelf to the trash. By accumulation and recycling I am cannibalizing my own work, is restless, reconfigured. I choose images from the bigger culture and I’m interested in advertisement and design language to talk about politics, art, painting, cultural issues, taste, the material world, pleasure, power, sexuality, gender and the role of the artist and his external life in the culture, not in a subtle way.

For me is really important to give the viewer an active role and contrast what they see with their own experience and preconceptions. I treat my art as I treat my Facebook profile, and I like to off-center things, both literal and conceptual. The juxtaposition of both, art materials and everyday-life materials put them all in the same category, could be products, handmade stuff, something done by someone else, can look careless, garish, we all live in a vortex. I guess I just do what they do, but maybe more explicitly, remember; too much sugar could take off your legs.

I would say that I am very interested in theory and history, not just for art but also in life. I guess Dada is the biggest influence, then the Pop artists of the 60’s, later on there are names as Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Naumann, Piero Manzzoni, Richard Prince, Santiago Sierra, Cildo Meireles, Félix González Torres, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Krueger, John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Ken Lum, Jeff Koons and Nancy Dwyer and all in combination with Baroque, Neoclassicism and of course Fragonard.

But I prefer toys.

Juan Camilo Guzmán