Juan Manual Salas

Juan Manuel Salas structures his practice around investigating the nature of pictorial phenomena and their dialogue with contemporary imagery. For him, painting functions as a system of signs, free from prescriptive rules or stylistic constraints, allowing him to move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, photography, video, and installation depending on the conceptual demands of each project. Salas often begins with existing photographs or videos—sourced from public archives, obsolete books, or online platforms—typically depicting ordinary or symbolically modest scenes. Through the act of painting, he transforms these ephemeral images into tangible, material forms, giving them new life and presence. This process of re-signification turns fleeting visual moments into immersive, physical experiences, creating a bridge between the immateriality of digital or archival images and the concrete reality of painted matter. His work emphasizes the ritualistic and transformative power of painting, engaging viewers in a reflection on perception, memory, and the poetic possibilities embedded in everyday imagery. ...