Diego Narvaez - Behind Us

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Diego Narvaez, "Behind Us," 2020

Meet and greet on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October, from 12 to 4 pm 

Diego Narvaez - Behind Us

"I work from the direct encounter with the environment to paint natural and urban landscapes. From Antarctica to Mexico City, Iceland to the West Coast of North America, I am interested in experiencing places that are in continuous transformation. I am particularly interested in the contrast of the natural and the urban surroundings and how, through painting, the everyday can interweave with the sublime. I believe landscape painting is a radical tool nowadays because it calls for us to look carefully at the places where we cohabit and commonly take for granted, but it can also open questions on our relationship with faraway and pristine places. I paint this kind of landscapes to be able to construct and erase, detail or just insinuate what a place could be for any of us, like a memory, like the way our perception constructs what we call reality. In this sense, each of my paintings is not fully done, it needs the observer in order to be “completed”; it exists only when seen. Through my paintings, I want to question the way we perceive and therefore interact with our surroundings. I have learned through my artistic practice that looking for the right questions is of much more value than constructing a fixed idea or answer. Accordingly, I create landscapes that work like open metaphors, rather than images with a unique meaning."

Diego Narvaez (1984) was born in Mexico City and moved to Sooke, BC in May 2019. His work focuses on landscape painting while creating visual metaphors of how we, as society, construct reality through sight and how this affects our relationship with the environment.