Juan Araujo
Libro Ponti II
2006
Libro Ponti II
Juan Araujo’s most recent paintings examine Venezuelan and Brazilian modernist architecture and its complex relationship to certain ideologies and belief systems that deeply marked Latin America’s cultural development. Like many of Araujo’s works depicting reproductions, Libro Ponti II (Ponti Book II) is a re-creation of a book about the Italian architect Giò Ponti. Ponti designed the Villa Planchart, a modernist house in Caracas that, when built in 1956, reflected the emergence of an increasingly globalized Venezuelan class, in both the cultural and the economic sense. Araujo’s replica of the book thus refers to the role and visibility of Venezuela in circuits of global cultural production.
Juan Araujo’s work often begins with photographs he takes of a physical site, or with representations in books and archives, which then become source material for paintings. Since 2004 he has worked frequently with architectural locations, focusing primarily on private mid-century residences and their surroundings that exemplify Latin American Modernism. By reproducing fragments from urban images, many of them facades of different types of architecture, he makes visible a tension between the desire to represent and the manufacture of visual stereotypes. Through the symbiotic relationship between the paintings and the buildings he appropriates, Araujo informs the way we think about architecture, and about Modernism more generally. The works can be viewed as personal reflections, but the opportunity for universal interpretation is equally strong; they are a stunning record of one artist’s determination to observe and question modern life.