Born in Barcelona (Spain) in 1993, Juan Bocanegra grew up surrounded by the love that his mother gave him for artistic tasks and from a young age his weakness for art made his parents enroll him in painting and dance courses when he was only 6 years old. In a small studio that was created in his grandmother's house, he made his first paintings. His grandfather had dedicated himself to construction and used materials that he had at his disposal such as cement, sand and other elements to capture what he felt on the canvas.
His first paintings were still lifes, seascapes and portraits that he made of his closest family. In some portraits he used his body and face as a model. In all his paintings he added textures and materials that he found in the studio.
Dance and painting have marked his life and career. In 2017 he made a series of dance portraits and self-portraits and held his first solo exhibition entitled "Love and Dance." There, he presents a self-portrait that impacts the public with its message, it is the self-portrait of a child who loves dance and cries because he wants to dance to feel free, but his society does not understand him (A child dancing in Auschwitz, 2017).
After a long process between figuration and abstraction, he began to remove the dancing bodies he had painted with oil and the result was an abstraction derived from figuration (October 1, 2017).
Abstraction has accompanied him until today, he has had several stages, some where circular shapes prevailed as in the work (Love of Two II, 2017) and other rectangular stages, where he painted square shapes to create a puzzle, where all the pieces that were in the work fit into a single shape, as in the work (One, 2019) and (Five, 2019).
After working in abstraction and understanding the purpose he wants from his work, Juan Bocanegra, painter and dancer, has as his concept a dialogue between dance and painting. He uses plastic expression to express dualisms and conversations between the two disciplines, which he develops with antagonistic movements, to reach an emotional balance, with a final plastic result. The themes he uses arise from his daily life and his travels through Europe, Asia and America, (Ciel et mer de Saint Tropez I, 2023). In 2024, after a serious appendectomy, he promised not to stop painting and dancing, not even for a single day in his life.
He has participated in collective exhibitions in Barcelona, Paris and New York, among others. And some of his works are part of private collections around the world.
Definitely, Juan Bocanegra is an artist who captures dance through painting, his two passions.
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