On The Road Again

Front cover: Juan Bolivar, On The Road Again, 2023, found objects, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Back cover: Juan Bolivar, 2023. Image courtesy of Charlie Gray.

Editorial design: Julius Killerby.

Photography: Julius Killerby & Charlie Gray.

Artwork Photography: Daniel Browne.

© 2023 JGM Gallery, Juan Bolivar, Charlie Gray, Daniel Browne & Julius Killerby.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7392905-7-3

JGM Gallery 24 Howie Street

London SW11 4AY info@jgmgallery.com

Juan Bolivar and his paints, 2023. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN SHOWING AT JGM GALLERY LONDON

AN EXHIBITION OF NEW PAINTINGS BY JUAN BOLIVAR | 13 SEPTEMBER TO 21 OCTOBER 2023

JGM GALLERY PRESENTS ON THE ROAD AGAIN AN EXHIBITION OF NEW PAINTINGS BY VENEZUELAN-BORN BRITISH ARTIST, JUAN BOLIVAR.

A CENTRAL THEME OF THIS EXHIBITION IS THE IDEA OF THE 'LONG-HAUL', USED BY BOLIVAR AS A METAPHOR FOR THE CREATIVE JOURNEY AND THE ISOLATION OF THE STUDIO. HE ESTABLISHES THIS ANALOGY BY BRINGING TOGETHER CANVASES OF VARIABLE SIZES WHICH, IN COMBINATION, REPRESENT LARGE VEHICLES. MANY OF THE WORKS IN THIS EXHIBITION, THEN, FUNCTION BOTH AS SCULPTURES AND AS PAINTINGS.

ART HISTORICAL REFERENCES ARE FREQUENTLY MADE. WHEN INTEGRATED WITH UNEXPECTED SUBJECTS, SUCH AS A TRUCK OR A FIRE ENGINE, THESE WORKS BECOME SPRINGBOARDS FOR NOVEL AESTHETIC AND CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATIONS. IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT A FILM DIRECTOR BRINGS TOGETHER DISPARATE COMPONENTS (MUSIC, CINEMATOGRAPHY AND A SCRIPT), BOLIVAR INTEGRATES ROGUE ELEMENTS WITH WELL KNOWN ARTWORKS. IN THIS WAY, HE MODIFIES THEIR MEANING AND DIRECTS HIS AUDIENCE TOWARD UNEXPECTED CONCEPTUAL TERRITORY. MOREOVER, THE OSTENSIBLY LOW-BROW NATURE OF THE LONG-HAUL VEHICLES NEGATES THE GRAVITAS OF THEIR ART HISTORICAL COUNTERPARTS, ENCOURAGING THE VIEWER TO ENGAGE WITH BOTH IN NEW AND UNORTHODOX WAYS.

BOLIVAR SAYS THAT HE WANTS "... TO MAKE SLIGHTLY MISCHIEVOUS PAINTINGS... THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS THAT INVITE THE VIEWER TO QUESTION THE UNDERSTOOD SIGNIFICANCE OF HISTORICAL WORKS." THIS "MISCHIEVOUS" APPROACH MANIFESTS IN A VARIETY OF VISUAL PUNS AND TROMP L'OEIL EFFECTS, MOTIFS THAT EXPOSE THE INNER WORKINGS OF THESE PICTURES AND THE ILLUSIONISTIC NATURE OF REPRESENTATION. IN STYX , BY EXAMPLE, A POSTCARD OF MALEVICH'S SUPREMATISM (1915) APPEARS TO BE FIXED TO THE CANVAS WITH PAINTED MASKING-TAPE. THE TAPE USED IN THE MAKING OF THESE WORKS BECOMES A ROGUE ELEMENT, BUT ALSO CONTINUES MALEVICH'S PICTORIAL LOGIC, MIMICKING AS IT DOES THE RECTANGULAR SHAPES OF THE ORIGINAL COMPOSITION, WHICH WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE EXHIBITION COULD FLEETINGLY BE READ AS SCHEMATIC ROAD SIGNS.

STEVEDORE , A WORK WHICH OVERTLY REFERENCES THE STRUCTURE OF AN ALTAR PIECE, ALSO INDICATES BOLIVAR'S INTEREST, NOT JUST IN CERTAIN ARTWORKS, BUT IN THE CONTEXTS WITH WHICH THEY HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN DISPLAYED. BY INTEGRATING THIS RELIGIOUS STRUCTURE WITH THE SECULAR CONTEXT OF A CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY, BOLIVAR EVOKES AN INTRIGUING DISSONANCE, WHAT HE HIMSELF DESCRIBES AS A KIND OF "SILLINESS."

FAR FROM UNDERMINING THE CANON, BOLIVAR VIEWS ON THE ROAD AGAIN AS AN EXTENSION OF THAT TRADITION, A REMIXING OF THE AESTHETIC INGREDIENTS THAT WERE ONCE USED BY GIOTTO, MONDRIAN, ALBERS AND DER LECK, AMONGST OTHERS. JENNIFER GUERRINI MARALDI (DIRECTOR OF JGM GALLERY) SAYS THAT "JUAN'S WORK REMINDS US THAT ART IS MUTABLE AND AN EVER EVOLVING CHALLENGE TO OUR POWERS OF PERCEPTION... THERE IS A POTENT MAGIC IN THESE PAINTINGS, WHICH EXISTS AS MUCH IN THE MIND'S EYE AS IT DOES IN THE GALLERY."

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY JENNIFER GUERRINI MARALDI 6

SIGNS BEING THEIR OWN ESSAY BY KATIE PRATT 9

JUAN BOLIVAR IN CONVERSATION WITH JULIUS KILLERBY

Juan Bolivar in his North London studio, 2023. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

FOREWORD

BY JENNIFER GUERRINI MARALDI

Juan Bolivar has never shied away from the Canon. The perceptual and conceptual discoveries of the past animate and sustain him. He seems equally interested, however, in what remains unsaid - or

perhaps untested - by the great traditions that precede him.

Remixing contents and contexts, On The Road Again belongs in some sense to the historical fiction genre. The originals that Juan references were made for a different audience and, as objects, lived lives of their own, recounted by various writers and art historians. What happened, though, to the Malevich or the Mondrian that lived another life and went down a different road? What does a Kenneth Noland say to us when it takes a left instead of a right?

On The Road Again re-energises the Canon and reminds us that the essence of exceptional art is not immutability but perpetual metamorphosis. Like Mary Shelley's great protagonist, Juan animates his test subject, imbibing it with character and intentions entirely its own. There is a potent magic in these paintings, which exists as much in the mind's eye as it does in the gallery.

This exhibition is ultimately the product of an audacious curiosity for the uncharted territories that lie beyond revered traditions and I am incredibly proud to bring it to our audience here at JGM Gallery.

Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi with Bob Gibson's Patjanta Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Juan Bolivar, Tipper (detail), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 150cm. Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

BY KATIE PRATT

Taking the long view, Juan Bolivar’s painting has always shimmied between graphic representation and imaginative invention in a geometric abstract realm. Its imagery oscillates between discernible pictograms and Neo-Geo compositions rendered with a delight in the immaculate materiality of acrylic paint. Variously in successive series, external references permeate Bolivar’s painterly language. Consistently, this includes citations to specific renowned paintings: homage to the artists from whose endeavour Bolivar learned his craft and to which he continues to index his visual lexicon. All abstract painting relies to some extent on such historical references - that is the glossary by which it communicates to viewers. Without such a linguistic framework, abstraction autodeconstructs into the decorative configuration of its formal constituents. It is by drawing upon the art historical vocabulary and cultural vernacular in one’s head - and cross-referencing these with the artwork - that the full intention of the artist can be contemplated. The viewer can relish creative innovation through interpreting the painting present with the grammar of past masterworks.

Bolivar’s painting, however, adamantly asserts cultural democracy. This condition presents itself in the mélange of simultaneous images - absorbed from both popular and ‘high’ culture - that is frequently found within the painting and that negates hierarchical structure. Icons of minimalist abstraction sit alongside commercial branding and emblems of US popular culture transmitted into the then young artist’s burgeoning visual compendium in the stream of American television broadcast in Venezuela throughout the 1970s. Venezuelan Modernist architecture, too, had a formative impact and formalised Bolivar’s reading of Minimalist painting. Its occurrence in these paintings proposes that its status is equal to that of European Modernism and to the artist, it represents nostalgia for an era of optimism, renewal and hope.

In this ludic suite of new paintings, Bolivar explores an inverse pareidolia of sorts, where abstract paintings are seemingly recognised in random objects. On The Road Again encapsulates instants where Bolivar found artworks in the ideograms of road traffic: the square end of container lorries, hazard signage, high-visibility stripes and the graphic instruction symbols.

Representation and interpretation concertina as imagery interchanges between its potential significations so that the painting flickers in and out of abstraction, quotation and invention. There is an exchange between vehicles, paintings and representations of paintings that alternate identities with each other so that interpretation is in flux.

The paintings in On The Road Again utilise direct appropriation which is wittily complicated by the playful context that Bolivar establishes within each artwork: Bolivar’s output is simultaneously simulation and simulacrum. Swap Body, for example, represents Kenneth Noland’s Early Flight, painted in 1969 and encountered earlier this year by Bolivar at Pace Gallery, London. Whereas Noland’s painting is habitually exhibited conventionally and objectively, parallel to the floor, Bolivar’s homage is tipped at a jaunty angle and rests atop a black and white painting of geometrically concentric circles on a rotunda canvas. Aside from the Noland quotation, Swap Body represents a graphic toy-like image of a lorry trailer awaiting its cab, confirmed by the painting’s title.

The sustained residence deep in his memory of the paintings he admires lingers with Bolivar. There is an interplay here between memory and projection and exploitation of the plasticity of memory. Memory asserts itself distinctly and precisely when fresh in the mind and consuming conscious thought. At the same time, there is the general fabric of a person’s knowledge whirring in the background, the instants and elements available upon recall but not always pressing to the fore. The favourite books lying around the studio that are idly browsed while collecting one’s thoughts are a prescient example. Concentration is fractured and dulled by the half-consciousness of familiarity. The intimate connection between Bolivar and his formative influences comes not from which paintings he has seen firsthand or most recently but rather "how long they’ve lived with you…". There is a profound reverence that - paradoxically - coexists with a cheeky impulse to disrupt the sanctity of these grand oeuvres. Bolivar describes this relationship as having evolved to the point of fostering the "familiarity to tease".

Besides, there is evident humour in simultaneously celebrating the pristine minimalism of the equidistant, horizontal lines of Early Flight while not only physically tilting it but also collaging it so as to resemble a toy truck. Images are morphed and mixed up into an unorthodox combination and the cultural reading is appropriated.

"Nerdiness" in painters often manifests as an obsession with a particular property of paint or the preoccupation with a series of determinative paintings. No matter how diligent an art-scholar be, however, there are always artworks and artists that elude the cerebral database. As an art professional, the nagging awareness of knowledge gaps looms large. Bolivar's paintings address this imposter syndrome directly and with candour. In citing such illustrious artworks, the artist bluffs his art historical credentials and we are all in on the joke for secretly we too feel as if our own art history knowledge is inadequate.

In On The Road Again, the viewer is repeatedly positioned behind vehicles when standing in front of a painting: this is a metaphor in acknowledgement that the paintings are made after these great artists. There is yet another visual pun at play:

the lorry is static and two-dimensional so we are destined to permanently follow it, never to overtake.

These paintings exuberantly celebrate pleasure in colour. The paint is applied smoothly, densely and evenly; evidently indulging the painter’s jouissance in both the physicality of the paint and the painting process. "Paint is a vehicle too", he quips. The surface is near-perfect so that any deviance from meticulous homogeneity - the faintest trail of a brushstroke, say, or the undulating lip of a masked edge - authenticates the physical engagement of facture. In the same way that middle C played on a piano sounds quite different when played on a cello, these nuanced imperfections project the distinctive timbre and musical texture of the painting.

Edwin Abbott created a fantasy uniplanar world in his 1884 novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, where the characters’ respective shapes indicate their every physiognomical trait and - controversially - their social status too. There is no spatial perspective in Flatland… except a hypothetical two-dimensional one where foreshortening and depth of field can be seen within the sole plane of existence. Yet colour, which is portrayed as a frippery by Abbott, obviates the need to calibrate space anyway, since each facet potentially bears its own hue. Likewise, the reductive forms in Bolivar’s paintings exhibit a consistent internal logic. Elements develop individual characters and assume singular roles in the construction of a narrative of abstract symbols, sometimes reemerging elsewhere in another painting.

Within the picture-plane, each form is a character that asserts its distinctiveness and autonomy while simultaneously making a bespoke contribution to the composition. Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) is a case in point, transposed in both Camion (2023) and UFO (2013), while Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III is quoted in Guagua and Gandola (both 2023). The notion of reappearance is reiterated in the titles: Camion and Gandola mean the same thing: lorry in British English or truck in US English, but whereas camión is European Spanish, gandola is an idiom unique to Venezuela and is a corruption of gondola. Guagua means bus or coach and is the American

Spanish equivalent of autobús in Castilian. This do-si-do of words and ideograms proposes a profound critique of globalisation as well as an expression of the cultural confusion experienced by emigrés to whom a sense of belonging is also transient and often elusive.

The paintings in On The Road Again consistently exhibit the quality of being two or more things at once. They hover between a representation of a painting - whether a citation or an original statement - and a signifier of a vehicle. Barn Doors I is a transcription of Barnett Newman’s 1967 painting, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II, yet is also the back of a container lorry while nonetheless expressing an emphatically autonomous composition. The black canvases adjoined to the bottom edge depict both truck wheels and art handlers’ chocks that protect the canvas from the floor during installation. It is a whole new composition and context: a radical reinterpretation of the original. There is a simplified pictorial stylistic so that we are reminded of toys or cutout wall panel interior decor. In some paintings, Hazmat and Tipper (both 2023) for instance, the hinges are visible. This is both a glimpse behind the scenes as to the painting’s construction and a vehicular axle. In fact it is another optical pun since there is no technical necessity for a visible hinge.

This double-plus meaning of signifiers is an ongoing project in Bolivar’s portfolio. Tromp l’oeil puns abound, such as the masking tape in UFO (2013), Styx Journey and Def Leppard (all 2023). These small works all represent portraits of postcards of paintings taped to raw canvas - a telescopic train of representations of reproductions of representations. And yet the strips of tape also operate at the level of geometric abstraction as rectangular forms.

This methodology sounds very premeditated but there is still a strong intuitive impulse to the making process. Placement and the juxtaposition of forms is a response to the artist’s visual sensibility and insight as he works out the composition through process as he asks himself "What’s the least I can do to make [a painting] work?" While the strata of signifiers and significations pile up within these paintings, the experience of contemplating them is one of restraint and levity.

REFERENCES:

Abbott, Edwin Abbott (1995), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, (first published in 1884), Project Gutenberg, updated 26/06/2022, https://www.gutenberg. org/cache/epub/201/pg201-images.html, accessed 21/07/2023. Baudrillard, Jean (1983), Simulations, New York Semiotext(e).

Kenneth Noland: Stripes/Plaids/Shapes (2023) [Exhibition], Pace Gallery London, 25/01/2023-25/02/2023.

Bolivar, Juan (2023) in conversation with Katie Pratt in the artist's London studio, 03/07/2023. Bolivar, Juan, ibid.

Left: Katie Pratt, 2023.

Image courtesy of Katie Pratt.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

- Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884)

Below: Juan Bolivar, Camion 2023, acrylic on canvas, 16cm x 42cm. Image courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Juan Bolivar In Conversation

IN THE WEEKS PRECEDING ON THE ROAD AGAIN, JULIUS KILLERBY (JGM GALLERY'S ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR) VISITED JUAN BOLIVAR IN HIS NORTH LONDON STUDIO. THE VISIT WAS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR BOTH TO DISCUSS BOLIVAR’S WORK & THE UPCOMING EXHIBITION.

Juan Bolivar in his North London studio, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

JULIUS KILLERBY So, Juan, in what ways does music find its way into your work?

JUAN BOLIVAR I first began introducing, or at least referring to, music in my work in an exhibition called Bat Out Of Hell (2011) at Jacob Island Gallery. It was the first time that I not only titled works after Rock songs, but I started making references to historical artworks. It’s an interesting coincidence that those two things overlapped. It was initially informed by the problematised use of music in combat, or in video games... you know, this kind of grey area for music... but then, as time has gone on, I’ve realised that there’s actually a tradition of musical elements being adopted by painters in the past. If you look at Vermeer, who often made musical references in his paintings, or Mondrian and de Kooning, who both owned records players ahead of their time, you get a sense that music is adjacent to the making of paintings, and its gradually formed a bigger role in my work.

JK So are you interested in how music changes the context of the thing it is presented with, or alongside?

JB Well I guess there’s that element, not of how music changes the context, but how it can contextualise something. I like, for example, the way that Adam Curtis, the documentary film maker, uses music to offset images. If one is thinking about music, then one almost has a different lens that you’re looking at your work through. I also like the way that music carries memories for people, and how it can take you back to certain points in your life. It’s also, in some sense, a way of referencing culture, in a way which not everybody will be familiar with but it can also have a universality.

JK Is music implied by the title and subject matter of this exhibition? Because large vehicles and the phrase, “on the road again”, at least for me, brings to mind the songs that I would listen to whilst on a road trip.

JB Yes, I’m using the idea of this imaginary soundtrack that somebody might be listening to on a long journey. The musical element functions as a metaphor for the idea of the “long-haul” and there’s this idea of the artist perhaps being on a similar long journey. It adds all these other associations to the idea of transportation. In my case, it’s the weight of the subject that I am dealing with. So, there’s this playful comparison being made with someone who is taking these metaphorical contents somewhere. I also like the idea that, in some ways, the whole analogy of being a truck driver is a bit like being in the studio where you have this

almost hermetic environment. There’s also comparisons between the isolation of the road and the loneliness of the studio. Truck drivers, also, will often customise the interior of their cabin and it becomes this private space in the open world.

JK Why the solid application of paint? It seems almost as though you’ve removed the trace of the artist. Would you say that’s accurate?

JB There’s two parts to that question. And the first part, you’re absolutely right, the colour is almost supposed to be a physical material. It’s not like what I call Photoshop colour deceit, which are colours that don’t really exist anywhere, except as binary information. The colour, in my case, is almost meant to be something that you could bite into. I want to get from it as much sensation or pleasure as I can by applying it in a very solid block. I’m not sure if I necessarily agree with the other side of the question. There is a type of touch, of application. There’s a sort of tactility to it, but it exists in quite a narrow range. It’s not as though the tactility is coming out at you like a Frank Auerbach. There is texture in my work if you look a bit closer. You will find slight ridges, brush direction, or paint dripping down the edge of the canvas. That said, I’m less interested in this idea that touch defines the work. I almost like to hold back a bit, so that other things can come through. There’s a few other artists that share this relationship with a certain kind of block colour that is applied in a certain way. There’s Peter Halley who achieves a block colour, rolling 50 layers of acrylic paint for each section. There’s an artist who sadly passed away a few years ago called Sybille Berger and she used to apply something like a hundred layers of colour. Then there’s another artist called David Diao who applies solid colour with a palette knife, or will sometimes screen print the colour. I think we all, in some way, share that intrigue with something that looks solid and mechanical but actually has a specific expressive range.

JK Would you say that the unspoken rule amongst you and those artists is that the paint is not mixed on the surface.

JB That’s right, there’s no modulation. That’s a good observation. The colour would almost always have been pre-mixed and then applied. Yes, there’s no pendimenti or scraping.

JK How does On The Road Again differ from your last exhibition with JGM Gallery?

JB The last show at JGM was called Powerage. In that exhibition I re-enacted a lot of the works that I’m still referring to. You know, Modernist painting, Colour Field painting, artists like Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis. In that exhibition (Powerage), I was inserting mid-century cartoons and cartoon elements as if they were existing within those works. The main difference between that approach and this show is that I am now placing what I call “rogue elements” adjacent to the works, rather than within them. The work is being referenced in an unadulterated way but I am changing the way that we perceive it.

JK In a lot of the work you’ve combined canvases of variable dimensions and in fact this is how you often suggest form, whether it be a truck or something else. What are the conceptual implications of playing with the border of an artwork like this?

JB Yes, that’s an interesting question. I’ve always been drawn to the way an artist negotiates the borders. I like to see what happens on the edge of the illusion. Mondrian’s interesting in that we imagine his work as very graphic but if you look closely at it you’ll see that some lines stop short, or go just over the edge. It’s like he’s trying to draw our attention to the border of the painting. I think borders almost suggest that the painting exists within a specific dimension. There’s a book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott and in this book he describes a fictional two-dimensional world which is one day invaded by three-dimensional elements. It’s all meant as a kind of metaphor for Victorian society and power structures but the lasting legacy of this book is how it made people think about different dimensions. In my paintings, I’m thinking of this idea of intertextuality, about how the painting can take you somewhere else. I hadn’t really thought about it until you asked the question but I think that in this show the additional things that are outside the border point to that idea of expansion.

JK It’s interesting because generally in a representational painting, one paints on a flat surface to create an illusion of depth. Your paintings, in that twodimensional space, have no illusion of depth. There is no tone. But you create

depth and three-dimensionality by playing with these elements outside of the canvas.

JB Yes. I play with the idea that the paintings are quintessentially abstract but that, in the mind’s eye, they can flip and become forms for trucks or anything else for that matter. In some ways it’s like the 19th century Duck Rabbit illustration, where two forms are simultaneously suggested. I like the idea that my paintings are also almost Lego-like and are reminiscent of toys that we might have played with in our childhood.

JK Are your works, then, just as much sculptures as they are paintings?

JB Yes. I was watching an old de Kooning documentary where they were teasing de Kooning with a question, with words to the effect: “What is a painterly artist?” and he answers with something like “Well, it’s an artist who wants to show the brush marks.” By that definition I do consider myself a painterly artist. There are probably other ways that these images could be made. They could be printed, they could be animations. They could be made in a way that distances the viewer from the mark. So there is an element of painterliness but I’m not really interested in the conventional definition of painterly.

JK Do you think that colour, as an aesthetic element, is the closest visual analogue to music? I feel that tone, scale and texture are less equivalent to music than colour is and I wonder if, perhaps subconsciously, that’s why those elements - tone and texture in particular - are noticeably absent from your work. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this?

JB I’m always a bit suspicious of the word “aesthetic”. I think that paintings are really complicated and you never just look at one element. It’s like a whole experience that you kind of mix internally. I think that today I would probably never discuss colour in that way. I might’ve done once, but today I think of it more as something that I’m sampling. It’s closer to a film director’s approach. Tarantino, for example, always talks about mixing things. He takes one thing and adds another layer to it and that sort of throws us in different directions. I also like this idea in music of interpolation, of inserting something of a different nature into something else. Until the 19th century this was how a lot of music was made. There were existing passages or motifs that were borrowed and then new pieces would be written using those set structures. I think that in some way I’m doing something similar.

JK I agree that Tarantino is a great example of how the combination of dif-

ferent elements can generate something conceptually novel. There’s that scene in Reservoir Dogs for example, where the policeman is being tortured while Stuck In The Middle With You (Stealers Wheel) is playing. It’s so perverse because it’s such a happy Rock ‘n’ Roll song and yet it’s being played while someone is having their ear cut off.

JB Yes and I guess what’s interesting is that we won’t know what these things mean until maybe one hundred years from now when the references are lost or forgotten. People won’t be able to locate or understand the references at that point so we will then see what we are left with. I find that interesting to think of how the work will live on. Already, some of the references in my work probably don’t register with the majority of my audience.

JK Art about art is a recurring subject for so many artists. I wonder at what point in Art History that became a thing.

JB Well I think that’s become more apparent but I also think that it’s actually always been like that. I think we always make things that build on something else. It’s probably slightly contentious but my view is that art is always about art.

JK Yes, perhaps we’re so far removed from periods like the Renaissance that we don’t see the references in their work. Are there artists who you’ve had a particular affinity for and who you’ve referenced more than others?

JB There’s so many really. There’s the Fayum mummy portraits, which I’m really fascinated with. There’s also Duccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca. I know it probably sounds really pretentious or cliché, but the first artist that made a real impact on me was probably Picasso. I loved his inventiveness, what he could do with line, the way he’d make images which would then become other things and just the sheer output. More recently I’ve been looking at artists who belong to the early European avant-garde, like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Władysław Strzemiński. There are so many. Paul Klee is just so lyrical and then there’s people like Bart van der Leck and Josef Albers. I love the work of Carmen Herrera, Marcia Hafif and Fanny Sanín. Philip Guston has been a huge influence on my work. I draw from all of these artists but conceptually my thinking is informed by Peter Halley and David Diao - or artists like David Salle or Julia Wachtel and the way they cut and paste, mix and match.

JK It’s interesting that you bring up the Fayum portraits because, as I’m sure you’re aware, they were made to be buried with their subject and weren’t meant to be seen by anyone else. I couldn’t think of anything further from art about art, in that sense.

JB Yes, they are pre-Byzantine. It’s pre-Icon painting that makes everything symbolic. They’re not about individual expression by the artist. They precede that change in art. They’re also quite naturalistic.

JK The way the eyes are rendered is incredible.

JB Yes, and they functioned like passport photographs for the afterlife.

JK It’s fascinating to think about the motivations of an artist who would paint something like that. It’s probably something that we can’t even conceive of. Did your childhood in Caracas have an influence on your trajectory as an artist?

JB The short answer is yes but it’s difficult to know exactly what that influence was. More and more Venezuela is becoming like this memory. It’s kind of like Blade Runner. You know, did I actually live there? Also, there’s the fact that Venezuela was, at that time, informed by many things. For example, there was a strong Modernist influence in South America, particularly in Venezuela. At the university where my parents used to teach, the campus was full of artworks and murals. There was also this mix of television and music and logos, a lot of baseball - there was this strong American influence. I think that mixing of things has probably remained in me. Venezuela is a place that I’ve written about in short stories and I often try to recall my memories from there. I grew up in Caracas, which is the main city, but we also travelled a lot to Margarita, which is a small island where my father was born and it was a little bit like going back in time or walking into a Magic Realist novel. In some ways it was quite a harsh environment. Nature is very powerful in a place like Margarita. We’d have bats flying through the living room while my grandma is watching telenovelas. You know it was like a Garcia Marquez scene.

JK I was just about to say it sounds exactly like a Garcia Marquez novel. His style of writing is so similar to how memories work, at least for me. Especially memories of childhood. There’s so many scenes in his work that almost remind me of a Rose Period Picasso.

JB The interesting thing about Magic Realism is that, in a place like Margarita it’s more like documentation, really. It’s not surreal. These things happen.

JK And I guess it’s also somewhat about the extent to which people believe in those magic realities. I was reading a book recently in which the author was explaining the impact of magic in history. What he meant by that is that, regardless of whether magic is real, the fact that people do believe in it means that they will act according to that belief. In other words, magic, as an abstraction, has real world consequences.

JB That’s a really good observation because yes, especially in relation to what we were discussing about interpolation and metareferences, it’s very easy to think of the works as conceptual games or art about art, but actually there is that strange sense of apparition, magic or transformation. They are paintings that then become something else. So my work is in some sense a bit like that. The idea of absurdity is quite important in the work. Silliness is, I think, the simplest way to explain it. It’s not just humour but a particular type of absurd silliness that happens with these elements, which I think you could connect to some notion of Magic Realism.

JK Does that silliness also negate the seriousness of the Western Canon? Does it make you or your audience more inclined to engage with works that might otherwise seem intimidating to play with?

JB No, there’s never any attempt to undermine or negate the Canon. I think it extends it. It’s a way of extending tradition, in that it makes you look at something again. I never see it as something that I’m trying to subvert or undermine. It’s like viewing these works with a clean slate.

JK Is your painting, Stevedore, meant to reference an altarpiece?

JB The work you are referring to is composed of two more or less identical van der Leck copies of a figure, and in the middle there’s a 1920s Mondrian. The idea was that it would look like two characters loading the back of a vehicle. Initially the painting was going to have blocks that suggest wheels so that it would be more literal but because of, as you say, the allusion to the altarpiece, I decided to leave it slightly incomplete so that it would look like the figures are loading something or they’ve opened studio doors, or something. The Mondrian, then, almost becomes like an environment.

JK That’s quite a seamless fit with an altarpiece then because of course very often an altarpiece features figures who are “unloading”, so to speak, Jesus from the cross.

JB Yes, that’s interesting.

JK Do you think that the “silliness” in your work is the result of bringing two vastly different contexts together? Your work obviously exists within a very secular context, as does Modernism to a large extent, so by bringing in that altar piece form you create a dissonance which is perhaps analogous to a kind of “silliness”.

JB Yes, but it also happens through putting two artists work together. They then create this other thing, this other experience. I don’t go out of my way to be irreverent but there is something that borders on that as well, which I’m really

drawn to.

JK Could you explain your process, Juan, from the first thought you have about a work to how that materialises on the canvas.

JB One way to answer that is... well... you’re always working on the same painting, if you know what I mean. Loosely speaking, I’ve been working on the same painting for roughly twenty years. 2003 is when I would say I began making work that I recognise as my work. Before that, when I was about four or five years old at pre-school, one of our tasks before taking a nap was to draw a fish. Everybody drew the same fish, the kind of generic body with the tail. I was looking at the person next to me and they’d drawn some waves. Then they signed their fish drawing with their name written along the same lines of the wave. I just thought “That is so good” and in a strange sense that kind of relationship to visual language underpins my process. Over the years I’ve found different ways to connect with that. In some ways it relies partly on surprise. When I first began making paintings in 2003 I would loosely describe them as “facialities”.

If you imagine taking a Colour Field painting or an Ellsworth Kelly painting, for example, and then you make a Mr. Potato Head with the eyes and nose etc. and then you stick that on the Ellsworth Kelly... the first time you do something like that there’s this element of surprise and you think to yourself, you know, that’s quite strange, but in my mind it’s similar to the signature in the waves from pre-school. You find ways to connect to that experience again. So, for me, there are two teams that make the work: one that re-enacts the work, and they’re very fastidious and will take a long time to, for example, build up the initial layers. Once that initial part is over, the work can stay in the studio untouched for anywhere between a day or a month. Then the other team comes in and says: “Okay what should we do with this?” I may have an idea already or it may be that I have no idea. So, for example, to go back to Stevedore, I’d had the idea of doing something with van der Leck for maybe two years. You never know what’s going to work and it doesn’t always work. I don’t like to destroy work but that does happen sometimes. It’s never really quite clear why a certain combination or intervention doesn’t work. That’s roughly the process. I generally only need to know what the next two works are going to be like.

JK Do you find that conversations like this help clarify the ideas you’ve been working with?

JB Yes, it definitely makes a difference, but even if there is some semblance of clarity, I don’t think artists ever really know how they arrive at something.

JK I guess these conversations are a way of rationalizing decisions in hindsight.

JB Yes, like drawing the target after you’ve thrown the dart. I’m slightly sceptical of that. Don’t get me wrong. I love talking about my work and it’s great to have these conversations, but I also think that one can say things that don’t really apply. I think to make art you have to be slightly clueless about what you’re doing. If there’s too much cluelessness then there’s perhaps anxiety surrounding your creative process and it suffers from that, but by the same token if there’s too much certainty then that can also be a problem.

JK Is the time between exhibitions, when you’re first deciding what work you’re going to create, an exciting period for you?

JB Yes, I enjoy elements of that. I think the most enjoyable moment is possibly when you have a wacky idea and you carry it through and you’re making the last little adjustments or retouching a work. When, you know, you’re getting it ready for the world.

“It's a way of extending tradition, in that it makes you look at something again. I never see it as something that I'm trying to subvert or undermine. It's like viewing these works with a clean slate.”

- Juan Bolivar

Juan Bolivar in his North London studio, 2023. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Previous page: (Bottom left) Juan Bolivar, Def Leppard 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm. (Top middle) Juan Bolivar, Tipper, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 150cm. Images courtesy of Daniel Browne.

Juan Bolivar, Towing Dolly 2023, acrylic on canvas, 98cm x 118cm

Juan Bolivar, On The Road Again, 2023, C-Type print on Fuji Pearl paper mounted on aluminium with subframe, 30cm x 30cm (ed. of 5)

Juan Bolivar, Cabriolet, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 54cm x 36cm

Juan Bolivar, Tipper, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 150cm

Juan Bolivar, Hazmat, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 180cm x 150cm

Juan Bolivar, Barn Doors II, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 83cm x 54cm

Juan Bolivar, Barn Doors I, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 83cm x 54cm

Juan Bolivar, Swap Body, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 144cm x 254cm

TYRE | BY JUAN BOLIVAR

One summer my father and I were driving cross-country to the east coast of Venezuela. We were heading to Puerto La Cruz – a port from which we would board a ferry to Margarita – the island where my father was born. We left early before sunrise around 3:00am. The old 'carretera’ de caracas, now replaced by a highway, meant exiting the city was no longer the treacherous journey through winding mountainous roads I remembered as a child. Even so the cross-country drive to Puerto La Cruz would take approximately eight hours. The long road flanked either side by vegetation would occasionally become a flatland interrupted only by fading cigarette advertisements or Pepsi-Cola billboards, concrete and breezeblock restaurants and restrooms with hand painted signs the only other signs of life. As the sun rose, the radio would keep us company on a road trip without many stops or exits. For the journey my father would prepare camomile tea and cold chicken. The car had no air-conditioning; a white Mercedes-Benz (off-white to be precise) which my parents bought straight from the dealership in Germany in 1969 when the ‘Bolivar’ was strong. Now over twenty years old the cracked upholstery bore witness to its life in the tropics, but ‘El Mercedes’ was as reliable as you get and never broke-down in all its years of service. My father had a near mystical relationship with this car. It took us to remote parts of Venezuela, from the Caribbean, to the Andes, to the Medanos de Coro – a small desert in the west coast of Venezuela. We grew up in this car like an extended family home; driving to school, the ‘UCV' (the university where my parents taught), Judo lessons, bowling on the weekends, and drive-in cinema nights followed by visits to ‘Tropi Burger’. Over time my father developed a short-hand, sign-language to communicate through the car like morse code. A long ‘toot’ of the horn, followed by a short toot – repeated twice –announcing whenever he was near home; always at a steady pace no matter how keen he was to get back. My father was a good driver who kept to the speed limit other than when overtaking vehicles. The journey to Puerto La Cruz was steady except for delays when encountering large trucks known in Venezuela as 'gandolas' – a word originating in the 1950s when Italian construction workers building roads in venezuela would refer to the trucks and transportation vehicles they had brought to the country as gondolas; a term that would later become assimilated as ‘gandolas'. Overtaking a gandola was a skilled art on a one-lane road, with oncoming traffic restricting opportunities. Skilfully timing these moments, my father would accelerate, calculating with precision the opportune moment for overtaking. The intense heat on the tarmac would occasionally create a mirage illusion of water appearing in the distance as vehicles approached. It was around 8.00am, roughly halfway on our journey, when a large leaf fell from a tree in front of us. The tree in question was not of a North American variety where leaves would at most be the size of an outstretched hand, but this leaf fell from a tropical tree variety resembling a palm tree normally found on a beach. Green-brown leaves extending onto the road, we noticed one falling slowly, so large that at first, we believed this to be an animal like a 'pereza' (sloth). My father slammed the breaks, slowing down; eventually driving over what we could now see was a leaf. Picking up speed again we saw a gandola in the distance. As it neared my father began to time his moment to overtake, when 30-40 metres away the gandola's back doors swung open revealing what can only be described as a giant tyre; two metres tall, staring at us like a raging bull about to be released. From this point time moved very quickly but very slowly, like in a movie; the left back door now fully opened outstretched onto the road as the tyre began to roll forward, leaping out of the back of the truck – hitting the ground and bouncing hard like a rubber ball from a game of ‘jacks’. The giant tyre may have bounced directly in front of us, or perhaps after a second bounce leapt over. Either way, the tyre taller than a car, bounced inches away from our bonnet as we saw this fly above us, land behind and roll into the distance. My father and I looked at each other in disbelief and without words, but with the suspicion that somehow the fortuitous falling leaf may have instigated an alternative sequence of events. Later that evening we related the story to my mother. She exclaimed how at that time in the morning she’d suddenly woken up shouting "Yaya protect them". Yaya: my mother's mother, who appeared to her in a dream on this day the anniversary of her death. During this period in the early 1990s I made paintings in a gestural manner depicting floating orbs one could loosely describe as planets. The planets became structures resembling colourful scaffoldings; later reducing my palette and motifs further still into hard-edge compositions. I spent the next years until the mid-90s making a series of paintings where the letter E was repeated in five colours set within a white boarder. By the late 90s other configurations had appeared gradually becoming colour-fields. The colourfields were empty and void of form until the millennium when circles reappeared, not as planets but globes set within facialities; like eyes looking at the viewer.

Juan Bolivar's notebook, 2023. Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Juan Bolivar, Guagua, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 15cm x 65cm

Juan Bolivar, (top) Construction I, (bottom) Construction II, both 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30cm x 46cm

Juan Bolivar, Camion 2023, acrylic on canvas, 16cm x 42cm

Juan Bolivar, Gandola, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 12cm x 34cm

Juan Bolivar, Box, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 49cm x 92cm

Juan Bolivar, Stevedore, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 113cm

Juan Bolivar, Water Tender, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 106cm x 234cm

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

COMPANION PLAYLIST

'THE JOURNEY' RICK WAKEMAN 8:55

'ON THE ROAD AGAIN' CANNED HEAT 3:26

'OYE CÓ MO VA' TITO PUENTE 4:34

'PLÁSTICO' WILLIE COLÓN Y RUBÉN BLADES 6:41

'EL CARRETERO' BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB 3:28

'I WONDER' SIXTO RODRIGUEZ 2:34

'DON'T STOP BELIEVING' | JOURNEY 4:10

'PEDRO NAVAJA' WILLIE COLÓN Y RUBÉN BLADES 7:25

'LIVE AT FOLSOM STATE PRISON' JOHNNY CASH 2:42

'BIG IN JAPAN' ALPHAVILLE 4:46

'ON THE ROAD AGAIN' | WILLIE NELSON 2:34

'INTRO' LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES 0:35

'ROSE ROYCE' | LOVE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE 3:58

'EDGE OF SEVENTEEN' STEVIE NICKS 5:29

'TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROAD' | JOHN DENVER 3:17

'HEAVEN AND HELL' BLACK SABBATH 6:57

'THUNDER ROAD' (LIVE AT THE ROXY) | BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN 5:41

SIDE B

XVIII

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

TRACK XXXIV

'INTRODUCTION/THEME

'AREPA 3000' LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES 2:35

'KEEP ON LOVING YOU' | REO SPEEDWAGON 3:20

'A HORSE WITH NO NAME' | AMERICA 4:12

'ULTRA-FUNK' LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES 3:58

'HIGHWAY TO HELL' AC/DC 3.28

'CABALLO VIEJO' SIMÓN DIAZ 2:59

'TOP OF THE WORLD' | CARPENTERS 2:59

'SINCE YOU BEEN GONE' RAINBOW 3:17

'NITRO EXPRESS' RED SIMPSON 2:39

'CRUCIFY YOUR MIND' SIXTO RODRIGUEZ 2:32

'TRUCK DRIVER'S PRAYER' RED SOVINE 2:25

'SE ME PERDIÓ LA CADENITA, LA SONORA DINAMIRA' | LUCHO PEREZ 2:35

'DRIVE' | THE CARS 3:54

'747 (STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT)' SAXON 4:58

'POR ESTAS CALLES' YORDANO 4:28

'BE MY BABY' | THE RONETTES 2:40

0:58

MOONLIGHT SERENADE' GLENN MILLER & THE ANDREWS SISTERS

Juan Bolivar's radio, 2023.

Image courtesy of Julius Killerby.

Juan Bolivar, Reefer, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 42cm x 70cm

Juan Bolivar, Heavy Hauler, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 50cm x 85cm

Juan Bolivar, Journey, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm

Juan Bolivar, Def Leppard, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm

Juan Bolivar, Styx, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm

Juan Bolivar, UFO, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 21cm

Juan Bolivar, E In Red, Crimson, Pink, Turquoise & White, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 55cm x 71cm

Juan Bolivar, Broadway I, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 86cm x 106cm

Juan Bolivar, Distribution, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 46cm x 31cm

Juan Bolivar, Sign, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30cm x 30cm

I WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE JGM GALLERY AND EVERYONE WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THIS EXHIBITION.

JULIUS KILLERBY FOR THE CATALOGUE DESIGN, FILMED INTERVIEW AND QUESTIONS.

KAROLINA DWORSKA, HEIDI PEARCE AND ANTONIA CRICHTON-BROWN FOR THEIR WORK ON THIS PROJECT.

KATIE PRATT FOR THE ESSAY ACCOMPANYING THIS PUBLICATION.

DANIEL BROWNE FOR THE ARTWORK PHOTOGRAPHY.

HARRY KINCADE FOR HIS ASSISTANCE WITH DOCUMENTATION.

CHARLIE GRAY FOR HIS PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT.

XIMENA BOLIVAR FOR THE ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING, WATER TENDER ELEVATIONS (2023).

KAREN DAVID FOR ENCOURAGEMENT, SUPPORT AND AFFIRMATIONS.

FINALLY, JENNIFER GUERRINI MARALDI FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO PRESENT THESE NEW WORKS AT JGM GALLERY.

- WITH THANKS, JUAN BOLIVAR

Juan Bolivar, 2023.

Image courtesy of Charlie Gray.