THE FOCUS

"For the past ten years I have been playing with how the eye filters what the mind perceives as spacial depth. I use slight temperature/tonal shifts, varying mark-making gestures, and different paint finishes that demonstrate Gestaltism in my practice. Gestaltism is a psychological theory postulating that the mind uses negative space, shape association, and tonal cues to dictate depth and meaning through vision. My goal with this present body of work is to experiment with what is necessary for...

Beyond Indexicality curated by Masha Vlasova "A rich tradition of aesthetic theory claims that film and photography are inescapably indexical.  Indexicality names the phenomenon of an object inscribing itself onto a surface and leaving a mark—evidence of its past presence. This mark—footprint in mud, fingerprint on a document—is an index. In film photography, light traveling through a lens and onto the sensitive emulsion-covered surface leaves a latent image from the moment the shutter...

The work of Juan Rojo has always been rooted in tradition, from Spanish Baroque painters to more contemporary masters like Lucien Freud or Frank Auerbach. While the paintings still contain allusions to those works, they exist as points of reference instead of the kind of derivative mimicry of his early paintings. In his new body of work, decoration plays a primary role as an element that intrudes and at times even obscures the faces of the subjects and disguises their...