In Juan Mario’s works the physical and gestural aspects of the artistic process are emphasized along with the ability to create truly beautiful paintings in a confident, mature style. The way he lays colors and the stateliness of his compositions maintain a affine balance between seemingly contradictory forces: control, spontaneity and imagery.
The abstract expressionist paintings and sculptures offer a critical reading of abstraction itself. Acevedo’s eccentrically shaped or multi-part canvases, loosely painted, executed with excruciating care interlaces with trend. The colors, the textures, the tension and the fragments, brilliantly conjugate with the contemporary. Acevedo’s current work within many of his paintings elevates the written word to subject and transforms traditional viewing into a type of reading. From the abstract to the postmodern world this painter´s real contribution to contemporary art is that which painting always tended to reveal in depth of meaning over time.
His gestural language allows a reading of the ego as an event that goes beyond any rational attitude. The artist chooses the place to transform the plastic phenomenon into a ritual in an opening action, allowing the vital energy to flow in a moving gesture that becomes visible in his pictorial writing, through which he reflects the state of the soul of our time. He becomes related to the construction of trans-vanguard movements, strongly saturated colors slide over the canvas to give shape to an amazing context. The support creates atmospheres in which figure and background interpenetrate in corresponding dialogues. The lively mind and entrepreneurial spirit of Acevedo transmits happenings and environments, which direct the focus from the artist as actor to the audience as creators. A wide variety of curving and flowing linear elements the shapes and direct the viewer´s eyes over the complex composition in continuous, sometimes sharp, motions.
Color And Adventure
Colors assault us in search of life within Juan Mario’s paintings. We find deep shades of blue that wander about as whales; green dyes that fade and intertwine vibrating in jungle-like nature; radiant shades of yellow that travel like light in bicycle rims; intense reds of fury, strength, and expression; and passionate violet shades that represent love. All this and more in an everlasting polychromatic rendezvous dreamt up by the author inside his palette.
Recreating abstract atmospheres, his foundations create universes of fauna and flora, and the notes of his musicians sing in harmony with color. The painter’s distress reflects, in each stroke of his spatula, interpretations of quests where a cosmos of colors teaches us to intuit natural disasters and social conflicts, for whom expressive qualities place him at the vanguard among abstract expressionist artists and in a privileged position in universal art.
His palette knives and gushes of color enjoy a certain genius in part influenced by Maestro Cesar Vallejo, with whom Juan Mario shared large workshop sessions in which they discussed themes of art and paint. Acevedo did not squander the opportunity to play with his colors, portraying movement, force, and expression.
Acevedo’s work is an artist’s encounter with his magic and canvas; his figures and atmospheres present themselves with the special acrylic treatment that involves us as in a game of colors where nature and being share a space for sensibility.
His work of abstract expressionist nature illustrates his sentiments in the quest for contemporary art where each stroke is an outcry towards existence, towards the lively presence of being of human and elemental being that strives for survival. Juan Mario represents this in his canvases covered with dyes and charged with vigor where the color, as we have already mentioned, is the center of the offer.
I write these words with satisfaction in order to inaugurate the exhibition generously hosted by the Cuban Embassy in Colombia, a circumstance which exalts us all, being the first exhibition of a talented and comprehensive artist: musician, intellectual, traveler, and painter.
The Maestro
The artist becomes the bridge connecting nature and man by means of the elements (water, earth, fire, air), so primordial in the creation that they make themselves present in each canvas bringing them to life.
It is the same nature through its fauna in danger of extinction that screams in these works full of expression, turning around in textures and color, forming a communion of mankind with the universe. This work is the sensitive of the artist receiving all the anguish of mother earth assaulted by the human race without caring that its greed will slowly consume that which gives us life.
Cesar Vallejo
