Rubén Molina (1969) was born in Barinas, Venezuela. He currently lives and works in the city of Mérida, Venezuela. He studied drawing, painting and serigraphy at the Taller de Arte del Centro Cultural Elbano Méndez Osuna. He taught drawing, painting, art history and he has also ventured into research, production and management of sociocultural projects.

Molina claims that masters like Jackson Pollock have inspired him by the characteristic freedom of the dripping technique. From the Pollockian tradition he is captivated that “the paint flows by itself and speaks without the need for any other tools or instruments other than the free fall of the pictorial pigment on the canvas”. As an artist, he values the intuitive and spontaneous quality of this technique, which uses pigments, one’s own body and non-traditional instruments. He feels that his expressive need is in line with that gesture.

The selection of artworks presented by Arte Original is made up of paintings, all with a certain portrait configuration. Molina takes a motif, which can be flowers, animals, anonymous faces or characters like Ghandi, and builds them, visually shapes them with gesture, with action. It could be said then that his work reinterprets the tradition of the portrait from contemporary readings. In the artist’s production, a particular dialectic is manifested between a pictorial technique that is associated with abstraction but that, in this case, also has a figurative purpose, since it refers to recognizable forms.

The fluidity of the paint generates dynamic and moving lines and compositions. His creative need, his technique, as well as his color palette are dramatic and expressive, with contrasting and vivid colors.

Ana Beatriz García