Juan Iribarren (Caracas, 1956) belongs to the lineage of painters who have continued the tradition and challenged the use of light in painting. Since the late 1980s, Iribarren's painting has established itself as a field of aesthetic tensions between the topology of the canvas/support and the perceptual space where visible objects, also vulnerable to natural light, can even lose their representational identity. A visual painting, always derived from the act of seeing the specific coordinates of real space, Iribarren's work translates into emphatic graphic structures that anchor, frame, or founder in resplendent fields of light, color, and atmosphere. Backlit matter, the dark, shadowy line, and the uncertainty of illuminated space coexist in each of these paintings. Each painting results from the superimposition of the image of the same spatial coordinate, on which the artist returns in the painting process, marking subtle differences, as if the unity of the plastic presence could only emerge in the repeated attempt, in each work, to account, in potentially inextinguishable variety, for a specific visual circumstance, sedimenting in the image its temporal variations.
Luis Pérez-Oramas
