Juan Lopezdabdoub - Artist
Juan Lopezdabdoub lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and is currently represented in New York by Agora Gallery. His web address is http://juanlopezdabdoub.com here is a link to a recent Exhibition (June 2009) and another interview.
Juan’s works are predominantly oil painting on canvas. His body of work, however, is quite varied in both media and scale, ranging from ceramics and wrought iron sculptures to watercolors and engravings.
Artist’s statement:
I like to think of my paintings as socio-political, philosophical and psychological visual essays. I use symbols and make references to mythology and culture to engage the viewer in conversations about the most basic meanings of life, and to enrich and deepen our understanding of the human condition.
I come from an environment of dramatic contrasts and opposites: wealth and poverty; care and neglect; love and hate; sanity and madness. My old world was a site where shades of grey were almost nonexistent: “You are in, or you are out; either you see what I show you, or you are blind; if you are not my friend, you are my enemy”. Between black and white there was only emptiness. We were either at the right or at the left, never in between.
My colors and forms are part of, and at the same time react against, that cultural baggage, heritage and perspective. The images I recreate on the canvas are connected to that place, a place, which now, can be this or any other place, a sometimes warm and nurturing world, and at other times a furiously violent and destructive one seemingly in need of a stronger means of expression instead of words.
Because of this world so full of delirium, delusion, obsession and fanaticism, I feel a need to make sense of senselessness and rescue life from decay. I love the act of scavenging, transforming and making the un-workable work.
But while it is true my artwork is a reflection of what can be considered my personal unconscious, it should be examined for its collective content, not for its private meaning. I encourage the viewer to see my work for what it brings to him or her. I want the audience of my canvases to sit in front of them and say, “let’s talk.”
How did you get into art?
When I was in sixth grade, my teacher realized I had a talent for drawing. At the time in El Salvador, teachers didn’t have the resources they have now. Part of their job was to draw illustrations for science, geography and other subjects on the blackboard. My teacher was not good at drawing. One day he asked me to come to the blackboard and help him with the rendition of a particular plant. I did a very good job and from then on I became the official artist of my class. I really enjoyed my job of making drawings on the blackboard and didn’t mind at all staying in the classroom while the rest of the kids went to play outside during recess.
My reputation as an artist at school grew to a point where other teachers came to “borrow” me to make illustrations for them. I was a kind of celebrity. Everybody admired my skills and saw me as somebody special. When it was time to go to high school I tried to enter the art academy of Valero Lecha, a reputed painter from Spain responsible for forming many of the now most accomplished and famous painters of El Salvador. Unfortunately, the academy required full-time attendance and was dedicated exclusively to painting.
Although I loved art and liked the idea of being an artist, I had always dreamed of being a surgeon. So I decided to enter a vocational school where, in addition to academics, I could also learn art. At the end of the second year, however, a family friend got me a position at an advertising agency with the idea of helping me to get some money during the summer break.
The break lasted many years as I ended up making a long and successful career as art director for advertising companies and later as a free-lance photographer. In 1991, due to the civil war in El Salvador, I immigrated to Canada with my family. After initial frustrated attempts to obtain a position in my field due to the notoriously required “Canadian experience”, I entered the School of Art at the University of Manitoba where upon graduation I was awarded two Gold Medals for highest achievement in Fine Arts.
Was your education in Fine Arts helpful, or a hindrance?
It was very helpful, particularly because I had the opportunity to explore media I had never explored before. The only aspect I feel strongly critical about is the program doesn’t help students realize the complexities of art as a career.
I believe they should offer a subject called “Art Practice” where students would learn the pragmatics of writing proposals for exhibitions and for grants, where they would learn the intricacies of the art gallery culture and also the mechanics of self-promotion, just to name a few things.
At the University there is an absolute silence about these and many more issues we confront after graduation. Students leave school with the wrong idea that for an artist it is enough to concentrate on producing art and wait until somebody comes along and discovers us so we can start selling our work.
The crude reality for the artist is you need to put the same amount of time, energy and effort at writing and promoting yourself than you do at producing art. It is a very difficult and sometimes frustrating job. It is a small wonder the career of many artists after graduation lasts generally only four or five years.
What or who inspires your art?
My existential experience, which is a universal human experience, regardless of gender, age, or social class. All of us want to be accepted, recognized and loved. We want to have a meaningful life and enjoy the fruits of our labor. We fear death, poverty and old age. We want to be free, to be understood. We want to know if there is a God and whether we can count on Him or Her. We want to be happy. We all have anxieties.
Has your work changed much since your early efforts?
Very much. When I was in El Salvador, I was very interested in urban landscapes. I was fascinated at how very poor people, within the misery in which they live, still care for the aesthetics of their homes. They build their houses out of cardboard, tin sheets and plastic, but they try to make them look nice.
Beauty, I observed, is a basic need. When I moved to Canada, the cultural shock and all the personal difficulties I encountered made me dive into my own internal landscape and my work became more of a catharsis, impregnated with socio-political, psychological and philosophical commentaries.
Do you hope the viewer will “get” what you are trying to communicate or do you feel compelled to spell it out to them?
My paintings always say something. There is always a story put together by the use of symbols and visual references. Most of the time, though, the story is not clear, not even to me. When I start painting I may have a feeling of what I want to say, but as the work progresses, it takes a life of its own and starts to “ask” for changes, additions and modifications.
I just follow my intuition and keep attentive to what is happening on the canvas. As a result, what I had initially planned to say turns into a different discourse. The story then becomes a “feeling” instead of something that you can spell out with words. For that reason, people sometimes feel intimidated by the complexity of the image and feel shy to even attempt to say what they perceive.
Instead of trying to express their reaction to the work, they end up asking me, “What does it mean?” Most of the time I feel tempted to offer my own interpretation, but then I feel guilty of betraying my own philosophy of letting people create their own stories.
How important is it to you that your work communicates something to the viewer?
Communication is the whole purpose of my work. I am an introvert and I don’t speak much but my mind is always busy making comments. I create art because I need to express my feelings, my thoughts and my beliefs. I do not paint to decorate rooms but to say something, to promote conversations.
Generally, though, I do not worry whether people pick up what I am saying in the painting, because the reading of a work of art is something very personal. People should construct their own interpretations. However, in my socio-political pieces, my intention is, at a certain extent, to be clear in my statements. I would like all of us to take action and do something to change the status quo.
Do you work from life, from photographs, from imagination or some other method?
Many times an image that I see in the newspaper or some publication triggers an emotional response in me. I use the image as a springboard to research other images either from nature, from other publications or from my imagination. In the end, what I produce becomes a juxtaposition of disparate images in concert with each other, tell a story and make a statement.
Some time ago, I saw a photograph in the paper showing a group of people in the National Gallery in London looking at a painting by Velázquez. The image made me think about the act of passive observation, of looking at something without doing anything, just sitting and seeing, mentally engaged, perhaps, but physically immobile. I thought about our lack of active engagement to what happens in the world.
We read the news and we get enraged about injustice, abuse of power and the suffering of other people and the misery in which they live, but we do nothing about it. I saw the gallery as a plutocratic global theater in which we sit in silence observing with our arms crossed what others have done. We comment, we agree or disagree. We like it or dislike it. We make our own stories according to our own experiences.
We conclude something and when we get tired of sitting and seeing, we get up, go home and keep on living our own existence as if nothing has happened. What else can we do? “Lounging on the Grass” is a painting that came alive out of my experience with that photograph. The 5’ x 8’ oil painting on wood parodies Edouard Manet’s bucolic midday snack on the grass into an act of relaxation and sensual pleasures against a backdrop of death. The lounging scene is a painting within a painting.
On the gallery floor, American superheroes, Superman and Wonder Woman, both old, wasted and decrepit, their bodies and faces a clear sign of defeat and resignation, observe absent-mindedly in the company of other gallery visitors, how former U.S. president George W. Bush and his British counterpart, Tony Blair, lunch and wine on and idyllic space in the company of a naked woman while at their back the whole world explodes into flames. A child poops on the floor, and Wonder Woman gets annoyed.
If you stopped doing art right now would you miss it?
I would miss it very much to the point of feeling as if I were walking on another person’s shoes or wearing another person’s head. I don’t think I could ever stop doing art. Art is something a person does because he or she has a particular personality, a particular mindset.
I stopped painting when I started my Spanish academy in 2001. I didn’t do any painting for almost six years, but during this time I wrote a novel, which filled my craving for expressing myself through art. The story is full of metaphors and visual images as if it were a huge canvas with all kinds of magical and realistic characters jumping out of the page. If I were not painting, sculpting or writing, I would be playing an instrument. I also wanted to be a musician.
Can you name a favorite artist and why?
My all time-favorite artist is Picasso. I admire his prolific career, his creativity, his imagination, his capacity for synthesis and abstraction, his speed and his great skill at drawing. I marvel at how during the same period of time he created so many different styles. I don’t see the point in some artists sticking to one formula, repeating and repeating the same technique and style over and over.
Life is great when we have variety. I love to be surprised and to run into the unexpected. Some people advise artists to stick to one style. The reasoning seems to be once the artist sells one work, the sale proves his or her style and technique is commercially successful. The implication is if one work has been sold, more with the same formula can be sold. I don’t like the idea of “tailoring” works of art using the same pattern. The role of art, I believe, is to explore and try different approaches, to invent.
For me, the content is first. The style of the painting emerges out of the subject matter. It is the vocabulary used to express a particular idea. Both of them come together as a whole entity, as a whole expression. My works look very different from each other because my practice is very dynamic, but all my paintings speak the same language with the same voice.
Technology has become an important marketing tool for many industries and individuals, what are your thoughts from a “You Inc” perspective and your art sensibility.
Social networking is a must if somebody wants to succeed in any field. I created www.juanlopezdabdoub.com about three or four years ago. It took me a huge amount of time to learn the tools and put together the site, but I am very glad I invested the energy. It has proved a great promotional investment. Still, how to get the website to attract the attention of art galleries, curators, art consultants, collectors and the general public requires careful strategy and planning. Don’t ask me how. I’m still trying to figure it out.
What about the role of titles with your work, some hate them others revel in them, what about you?
I cannot tell you enough how much I love the act of naming my works. For me, it has the effect of baptizing the child after delivery. When I was a teenager, I used to lock myself in my room to write poetry. I still have some of those early poems in a shoebox. I read them now and blush at how “cheesy” they are, but they are just innocent pieces of writings, the product of a very insecure and vulnerable boy in love. One day I wrote a story made exclusively out of titles of films. So you can realize why I love to title my paintings. I love long and fictional titles, like “The schizophrenic experience of a Madonna in the asylum corridor” or “The technological era of dysfunctional machines that make people fly”.
What or how do you respond to the term “Starving Artist”?
It is a destructive term. It works to the benefit of the market and in detriment of the artist. It is very unfortunate that some artists believe in it and propagate its use. There are starving people in all professions, but nobody talks about starving architects or starving lawyers. In Canada, among the immigrant community, there are thousands of medical doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, architects, scientists, etc., whose professions are not recognized and who have to do menial jobs in order to survive.
Does the gallery make the artist famous or does the artist make the gallery famous?
The pyramid of the art world has museums, art galleries, curators and art collectors at the very top. Emerging artists are not even at the very bottom but under, either drowning or making their way to the surface. Established artists are in some area between top and bottom, according to their signatures. I like to argue that art curators make the artists famous and consequently, the art gallery becomes famous.
There is no doubt that MoMA has amazing pieces in its collection. But it is in MoMA’s benefit, at the same time, that the pieces in its collection be famous. Some artists get lucky that a reputed art curator picks them up from the pile. Sometimes the artist has a real talent. Other times it is just a matter of luck.
A very impressive and complex review or curatorial criticism is enough to send an artist into the stratosphere of the art scene. I guess it is also a matter of being in the right place, at the right moment and surrounded by the right people.
Do you aim to make “masterpieces” with the aim of being seen in the future as an artist that really made their mark in art history?
I think all of us dream about leaving some mark and being remembered as someone who made a difference. I love my work as an artist and I want my paintings to be “alive” when I am gone. I strive for quality, and every time I begin a painting I want it to be a masterpiece.
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Compiled and edited by Steve Gray © 2009+
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