Juan Manuel Salas Valdivia

Juan Manuel Salas Valdivia’s work centres on the transformation of overlooked, ephemeral images into rich, layered paintings that explore the tension between memory, materiality, and time. Exploring pictorial phenomena and its possible bonds with contemporary images, Salas Valdivia begins with found photographs and videos - often sourced from obsolete books, online archives or forgotten public sources. Engaging in a ritualistic process of painting, Salas Valdivia gives these images new life by breaking them down. What was once banal or symbolically poor becomes something incarnate, tangible and haunted. Salas Valdivia approaches painting as a fluid, intuitive system of signs free from surveillance. Moving between figuration and abstraction, photography and video, he engages with found images, working into and over them to simulate decay and obscure their original meaning. His works resist clarity, functioning as simulacra - fabricated relics that explore the instability of meaning and the mutability of images over time. For Salas Valvidia, painting becomes an act of concealment and transformation, inviting reflection and speculation through the slow, layered unfolding of visual memory. ...