Astolfo Funes

The curator of the exhibition, Guillermo Barrios, comments on the work of the artist, "In the recent work of Funes, the picture of vision tends to open beyond the faces. Aggressive strokes and chromatic juxtapositions of wide palette impose tension on the hirsute bodies and allude with impulsiveness and frankness to the carefree environment where they, their majas and madonas, realize their existence. "

Astolfo Funes has been awarded the Prize as the Free Format and the Municipal Painting Prize of the Municipal Art Salon, Municipal Art Gallery, Maracay, 1996 and 2003; Honorable Mention in the XXVI National Aragua Art Salon, Mario Abreu Contemporary Art Museum, 2002; the First Prize in the III ExxonMobil Art Salon of Venezuela, Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, 2005. He has exhibited individually in Mérida, 2000; New York 2002 and 2004; Paris 2002 and Maracay 2003; "Ellas" represents his first individual in Caracas

Caracas October-November 2006

Woman’s

Personal works that ignore the despair exhaustion of painting had dropped on itself. These works seek to restore the experience of painting expressive through the subversion of many of their traditions, appealing to the primitive, the brash plastic taste to insubordination.

We do not exaggerate when we mention Astolfo Funes as one of the most prominent representatives of national resurgence.

Funes assumed if their condition complex contemporary painter and unreservedly exposes its iconography filled with humor, irony, sensuality and perhaps tearing. The artist enjoys shocks chromatic contrasts sponsoring risky with predominantly yellow, pink, fuchsia and blue. It also favors the incorporation of pigment textures in her pieces, creating surfaces that accentuate pasty expressive forcefulness of his painting

The space becomes equally expressive Funes. Gone are the conventional representation of the depth, since the artist works in the manner of children, in a single plane, and only zooming or shrinking-Gigantification-of figures help us to establish a better understanding of certain plans and the scene depicted.

Because Astolfo Funes's work is based on the configuration. However, as already noted, the artist attempts to subvert the tradition of painting through the recurrence of the original sources representation, those instances are left out and representative conventions seeking direct representation of our imagination, as children's drawing or art pathological. The artist also integrates elements that demarcate the flatness of the work and highlight its "street" as graffiti texts, annotations, and blasted stripes. The picture space often becomes saturated, in full mottled in deformed figures converge, color strident writings, stains, drops, marginal drawings.

The great theme of the work of women is Astolfo Funes. His paintings represent women, usually naked or bare-chested. Although his work has been associated with the Dutch-born American artist Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), who also dealt with the representation of women in long periods of its history, it is clear that the work of Funes is not loaded from the rage we see in the Women of De Kooning. The American artist, one of the leading representatives of Abstract Expressionism, introduced their thick atmospheres abstract women hardly readable narrative. Their women were deformed creatures that occupied much of the canvas and were subject to an expressive force that made it seem like suffering. In fact some critics have given this constant suffering and difficult representation of women, a reading that relates to the sufferings of the same De Kooning.

Torture and displacement are not directly present in the work of Astolfo Funes. The tear that could be interpreted in association with highly expressive quality of his paintings, is in any case screening by the mask of irony. Certainly Funes's work is imbued with the sarcastic approach to the reality of our own times. Their women, though festive and joyous, happy faces rarely show in them patentiza seriousness bordering on resignation. The scenes of revelry bars and constantly represented by Funes, realize it, as could be verified in the bar sies Toot disturbing work (2004), with which the artist participated in the mega-exhibition II, and is seen as the face representation suffering and anguish of a woman.

Satire is part of the discourse of Funes. On the winning play Art XXIII Municipal Hall (Leeds), Leda and the Rooster (2003), the artist introduces the classic theme of Leda and the Swan and ridiculed in a highly expressive work, brash and perverse sensuality.

The pleasure is always present in the work of Funes, but not as sensuous delight, but as the disturbing erotic drive, which connects us momentum death, as is evident in works such as Home- Crystal-with which the artist did awarded the First Prize at the Art Salon III-Exxon Mobil or the darkly humorous The Medical Malpractice III (2005).

B.R

Astolfo Funes.

Short bio

He was born in 1973 in Maracay, Venezuela, he lives and works in Miami in the US. Painting’s funes represents femininity and his artistic influences come from literature and from artists such as Willem De Kooning, Oswaldo Vigas, but also post-war german art for the strength and dynamism. Present in many auction houses, his works are in private collections and public including: Museo de arte contemporáneo, Maracay, venezuela; Solar, east hampton, New York; American Art Promotion, Paris; Fundacion Nelson Sanchez Chapellin.

The production by Funes, are purely pictorial works (the artist has also created large installations on PVC), with medium and large properties dating back to the most interesting part of his artistic career from 2008 to today. Tableau by strong and hot colors in which white color is the protagonist. The conceptual research by Funes, is linked to femininity but not limited to her: the attention to gesture, the mood, the occasion, become the leitmotif of his personal interpretation of beauty, pleasure and sin, between reality and artifice. The artist makes us act the cliché of femininity, built on the criteria of glamor and fashion with a personal expressive language, addressing directly the central themes of contemporary culture, the identity, the variety, the body and sexuality, mixing glamor to the history of painting, staging the ritual of human being.

The pictorial intervention sometimes spatula, sometimes imprinted with your hands, becomes a stage for a drama without event, the almost sculptural plasticity of the bodies etched plays and alternates to the empty space that surrounds them, in a game of full and empty, of body and soul, of apparently static and irrepressible physicality. Funes, paints what he see, focuses on multiple levels of reality, with the intent to expose truth and artifice and withdrawing from everyday life, as in a mirror, real and imaginary, fiestas and claustrophobic anxieties. Temporality, spatiality, worldliness, are elements around which the human being builds own self. These are stages that are undertaken in self-knowledge, a journey often unusual and without a precise goal, which is beyond rational logic and is seeking to modify the concepts or concepts of freedom, identity, health, disease, madness.

Astolfo Funes

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Astolfo Funes.