Juan Carlos Delgado
Bogota 1973

Juan Carlos Delgado studied Visual Arts at the University of the Andes (Bogota, 1992) and Fine Arts at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University Foundation (Bogota, 1992). He furthered his training by studying drawing, engraving and painting at leading workshops in Bogota and at the Massana School in Barcelona (1995-1996).

His artwork draws on painting, photography and sculpture for installations in exhibition spaces and interventions in public spaces. His projects, to which he never gives a title, are run through by a thread on the permanence or transience of memory, enabling him to reveal personal experience. The recurrent use of light and shadow with fluorescent pigments, reflecting metals, enamels and black oils, showing a clear reference to the sculptor Anish Kapoor, generates a relentless flow between the experiences of forgetting and remembering. Both the materials that Delgado uses and the volatile nature of the subject matter of his photographs (fire, smoke, ice, etc, always in a state of slow transition) show the fragility and fleetingness of the mark, memory and time, while submerging the viewer in a serene setting that inspires a contemplative, introspective state. The shadow and reflection to be found in his work are, like memory, a presence that accompanies the individual and which is necessary in order to demonstrate that he or she belongs to the real world while at the same time highlighting our short-lived nature. However, the act of recalling, which can only be experienced in the present, unlike the reflection and the shadow, shows us that a past experience is real, something that cannot be perceived here and now.

Delgado’s works have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Colombia, Venezuela, Spain, France, Italy and the United States. They are also to be found in many public collections, including the Bogota Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach) and the Sofía Imber Contemporary Art Museum (Caracas). Delgado has also received numerous accolades for his work, amongst the most recent of which was his nomination in 2010 for the Artist Research Fellowship Program from the Smithsonian Institute (Washington D. C.).

Isabel Tejeda