José Madera Niño (Venezuela) is an artist with a long career, trained in Pure Art, at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas, in Caracas (1977-1979) and guided in his artistic training by teachers Saúl Huerta and Pedro León Zapata. Madera Niño finds in urban culture an arsenal of images that have been a graphic stimulus for his work. He stops with a sensitive eye on the chaos of the city, on the traces that time leaves on the surfaces of the streets, on the abandoned billboards, on the buildings, on the walls that keep layers and layers of painting.

The artist confesses his attraction to the concrete city, the intervention of graffiti artists, the city hubbub, which although it limits a close relationship between nature and man, is also a way of life very marked by current dynamics. And the artist comments that it is not bad to see beauty in discouraging places and moments, and for our part, we affirm that artists have the capacity of sublimating situations, of rising above adversity. Madera Niño expresses: “the great gray wall as a canvas, the stain, either due to humidity, graffiti or advertising on advertising and the surviving vegetation. I don’t know if it’s because of resignation, but somehow, I feel complicit in this chaos by finding beauty in it”. In the group of works that we show, he brings together these elements of matter, scratches, graffiti details, color combinations on color, captured with an expressionist character.

Anny Bello