Juan Medina

Juan Medina
"Medina is an artist who grapples with themes that both epic and complex. Viewers are struck by the extraordinary three-dimensional effects he achieves in his paintings.

Juan Medina has been invited six years in a years in a row to exhibit his work at the prestigious Salon de la Nationale des Beaux-Arts Exhibition held at the Louvre Museum and sponsored each year by the president of France. In his first Salon Exhibition he was awarded a Silver Medal from the Society of Merit and Dedication of France in the field of the arts.

Medina is an artist who works on a grand scale. His paintings have been exhibited throughout Mexico and the Unites States, including in such cities as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and New Orleans.

One is immediately struck by the extraordinary three-dimensional effect Medina achieves in his paintings. His use of trompe l’oeil is startling as architectural elements seem to project from the picture plane. Placed in this seemingly concrete settings are figures that appear at once to be of the flesh and of the spirit. Medina’s imagery stems from the subconscious and raises questions about pour perceptions of spatial and chronological reality.

His winged figures suggest a quality of existence found in the “artistic a spirit”,; a spirit desirous to free itself from material concerns of day-to–day existence. The winged figure is the embodiment of the individual wanting to serve as deeper, more intangible need inside himself; that of his creativity and imagination.

In his paintings, Medina takes preconceived ideas of reality and turns them inside out; much like Alice experienced through the looking glass. He utilizes numerous references to artistic and architectural styles throughout history. These elements, in juxtaposition with contemporary models raise issues of the relativity of time. He also creates doubt in perception of spatial reality as figures seem to break through the composition's borders and occupy another dimension."
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"In the beginning it was shape, then came light, afterwards color and finally texture; as in the architectonic creation, the genesis of Juan Medina’s pictorial work rests on a solid structure of techniques and concepts that weave in plastic dimensions his memories made of oil and canvas.

With time, the step from watercolor to oil was the resource that allowed him to approach with mastery the conscience of time encrusted in stone, wood, mirrors and all model –object that transfers Renaissance rhetoric without moralizing it.
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Every one of Juan Medina’s paintings where “another” reflected universe emerges must be seen from this point of view: either the reflex is symmetric to another reality or it projects us, like the Mannerists, into a decomposition of space; hence to another figurative reality, that of memories, of which only he will hold the key.

His work expresses the desire of a new understanding of the everyday object, like a scientific approach to a latent reality. During more than 23 years he has painted progressively incorporating techniques and materials that have built a three-dimensional structure of virtual space.
The optic field in his recent works is not a mere assembly of trompe l’œil effects, it is the pragmatic synthesis of a hyperrealist-surrealist art that is in Mexico beginning to get rid of its atavism to folklore. In this sense, he is a part of the solid vanguard of Latin American artists that have been widely recognized abroad and that set the bases of Contemporary Art in Mexico.

Jorge Sánchez Becerril
Professor of Art History, National University of Mexico
Ph.D Architecture in Paris"