Víctor Julio González was born in Valencia, Venezuela (1961), the country where he lives to this day. Since he was a teenager he discovered his artistic inclinations, especially towards painting. He studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Arturo Michelena and at the Escuela Técnica de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas.

Although his production has undergone periods and transformations, in the selection presented by Arte Original —which is also the most recent—, titled Selvas de Venezuela, we observe a defined theme: the tropical jungle landscape. This particular series of works has been related to the one developed by Ferdinand Bellermann, a German naturalist illustrator who described and recorded the Venezuelan vegetation and landscape during his stay in the country in the 19th century. In Bellermann’s drawings and paintings “imagination, fantasy and subjective interpretation always prevail over the mimetic reproduction of the subject or motif: because in the light and chromaticism of his works, he always deprives an idealized, poetic, stylized vision, and to a certain extent romantic” says Adolfo Wilson.

Víctor Julio González, who has acknowledged being a follower and fan of Bellermann’s work, imitates the creative exercise of his predecessor from his contemporary perspective. His jungle landscapes are figurative without realistic or scientific intentions. He takes his photographic travel records as a reference, and from them establishes his own story from his imagination. The formats of his canvases are elongated, in the compositions he frames fragments and details of trees, branches, leaves and lianas. The brushstrokes are light and expressive, the shapes and backgrounds are fuzzy. The color palette is monochrome and cool tones, with a wide range of greens and blues predominant. He appropriates recognizable visual resources that refer to nature, and in his imprint a certain humid, disturbing, enigmatic, deep atmosphere is perceived, perhaps magical and of great symbolic charge.

Ana Beatriz García