Gustavo Zajac (1954) is a Venezuelan artist graduated as an architect from the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Venezuela, with studies in drawing, at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, and graphic arts, at the Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados, in Caracas, respectively.

It is worth noting that, for 24 years, Gustavo Zajac and Harry Schuster (1956-2019) formed an artistic duo where painter and draftsman worked combining their skills on a single support, making their four hands one, but each retaining their artistic personality. After Schuster’s physical death, Zajac took up his work as an individual artist.

Precisely, the artworks presented on this platform are the result of his most recent individual work, which was exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, Colombia, under the title Migrantes en camino al dorado, compositions in which all his artistic ingredients were duly considered, designed – support, images, technique, and materials – to support its curatorial concept related to his personal idea that everything can migrate.

Zajac, from his status as a contemporary artist, as he had been doing together with Schuster, turns to the History of Art, and from the past of painting he appropriates some religious and secular images, which he recreates by choosing fragments or details of them, to then intervene them according to his style, oriented between drawing and painting, in this case. The small-format images, which are duplicated like a mirror, are conceived on Arches paper, using the graphite technique, gold leaf and silver leaf, with the exception of the largest ones, Caravaggio como pretexto I y II, which are made on canvas, where the artist uses oil, combined with gold and silver, and Purificación, where he only applies oil as a pictorial drawing.

As everything migrates, the works represented here are subject to migrating to other places to be contemplated, be it in the spaces of a house, office, or an art gallery.

José Gregorio Noroño