Jose Antonio Ochoa Mexico, Spain, b. 1990

Biography

Mexico, Spain

Jose Antonio Ochoa was born in Mexico City in 1990. He had been interested in art, particularly in painting, since he was a child. The artist obtained a scholarship that allowed him to complete his degree in art in 2009. Following this, he travelled to Chicago in the U.S. to participate in a variety of courses at the American Academy of Art. A move to Seville in Spain to commence a degree in Fine Arts in 2011 set his career in motion. It is there, in the Andalusian capital, that he received a fundamental academic formation in art.

In 2013 he obtained a scholarship to study at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, graduating in Fine Arts and receiving his MFA from the same faculty. Although Ochoa’s artistic focus centred on painting, he has also worked in the realm of sculpture and with varying materials such as rock, metal, resin, wood, etc.

Jose Antonio Ochoa has exhibited in cities around the world including Mexico City, Santiago de Querétaro, Chicago, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza, Logroño and Madrid. He has also been selected to participate in various art competitions such as the PB Portrait Award, BMW Painting Prize, and the Parliament of La Rioja Painting Award.

According to the artist: “Contemporary visual culture has lost its capacity for contemplation. While seemingly art has moved away from outdated notions of beauty, my work argues that the sublime is overlooked in contemporary production. Through my painting, I intend to face the visual exhaustion, the fruit of mass media’s violent barrage of images. My optical silence claims the recovery of the intimacy of gaze, enabling the beholder’s contemplation. Paradoxically, my source of inspiration is precisely in pre-existing images; my works explore the way in which we relate to them. On the one hand, I’m interested in the narrative ability of images, ambiguity, and Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’. On the other hand, I work with the concepts of mystery, veil, tragedy, beauty, and the sublime. I have been enquiring into the relationship and mutual influence between cinema and painting lately.”

The images of my latest project originate from cinema, with the medium of film being translated into painting. An inversion of the traditional way, namely, that of painting influencing cinema. I turn to cinema because its pictorial sense is given. It has already built that image and all the sequence in which the atmosphere of a painting has been put into motion. I explore the way in which film directors have dealt with pictorial concepts, particularly the sublime, and I try to find a way to translate it back into painting. By making use of appropriations and decontextualisation, and relating images from different sources, I intend to produce new and enigmatic narratives that generate questions but don’t provide answers.”

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