Juan Iribarren  

Born in caracas Venezuela, Juan Iribarren studied at the  American University, in Washington, D.C. and later at the Université de Paris I (1983). Among his numerous awards and recognitions he received the Alma Thomas Prize for Painting (1977) and participated at the 30th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2013).  Iribarren's painting dwell in the manifestos of light through the  most pure sense of abstraction. In his words: " 

Immersed in observation, I part from the luminous stance of light (of lights and shadows)to which I remain always faithful. Simultaneously, I create a geometric structure (given by the planes of light or sun on the surface wall), and fields of colors applied gesturally (in my attempt to achieve color accuracy and shape of situations of light or luminous so changing). The result is a clash between two types of painting seemingly impossible to reconcile: an ideal and perfect geometric structure, and an atmospheric, gestural and indefinite painting.... I am interested in the legacy of modernist geometry, but this time subverted through its confrontation with a normally contrary painting that allows the atmospheric, the soft, the murky, the contaminated. I investigate through my works an equivalence, apparently irreconcilable, between geometry and light.