2016. First solo show.

“The incessant search for the self”

In 2016 Jean Carlos Puerto made the leap to his first solo exhibition in a gallery. This would also be the leap as a professional painting after several years of learning and searching. “The incessant search for the self”, became a dream debut in which the attendance was massive and the support received was maximum.

Exhibition text: “The incessant search for the self”

History of the stories

We are faced with a different artist, with an unappealable vocational call and an urgent need to create, to tell stories through his paintings. It is evident that his design is presided over by art. Jean Carlos Puerto (Caracas, Venezuela, 1981) has lived in Murcia since he was nine years old and in 2004 he received a degree in Psychology from the University of Murcia, but it was not until 2010 that he attended painting classes at the academy of the Murcian artist Miguel Vivo , which together with the lessons he receives from Antonio López, Andrés García Ibañez, Carmen Mansilla, Nono García, Cristóbal Pérez, among others, have been motivating the new painter who today shows his first exhibition at the Leúcade gallery in Murcia.

Nineteen paintings that leave the viewer shipwrecked between readings and questions distilled by each of the oil paintings on panel and canvas that make up The Incessant Search of the SELF. The intimate paintings made by Jean Carlos are drawn photographically from a verbal-plastic periphrase that transmits a generational heritage derived from an inhospitable collective identity… intoxicated, at times, with phreatic memories. The women and men that Jean Carlos portrays exercise action, despite his measured gesture; in their glances and in their thoughts we find a breakdown of the “dirty” and the “beautiful”, of the miseries and greatness that the mind produces, of the human contradiction.

“All behavior is communication”

“All behavior is communication, and all communication affects behavior”, according to philosophical reflections. The paintings in this exhibition are images that come from an analysis of the interrelationships of the individual and the systems to which he belongs (family, friendly, social, work …) and the behaviors are altered in silence, in the emotional implications exchanged between emitter and receiver, because here the character himself is the visible observer of the fabric of his own relationships. With vivid realism, heartbreaking stories are pictorially written, people with beautiful experiences are portrayed, and others possessed by ghosts emitted by inexplicable rejections.

The painter-psychologist rejoices in dark areas of the subconscious, investigates, looks and expectations, hatred, hopes, loves… and even sadisms arise; he placed everything as a suggestive “immovable normality.” The brushstroke of Jean Carlos is free, scanty, precise… the one that could remind us if “Then the child will want to dream (he can, he is not forbidden like others), he will want to fantasize to escape from there, from his gloomy and suffocating day by day ”, as Professor Fran G. Matute explained just a few weeks ago about the protagonist of the novel The Dispossessed, the work of the Hungarian poet and writer Szilárd Borbély (1964-2014), published a year before his fateful suicide.

Search for the self

Jean Carlos Puerto seeks his self by inquiring into the personality of other “passengers” on this trip, friends and acquaintances, who must pose to recreate a dreamlike universe, a space reconstructed with fears and / or joys, which the artist groups into three series: The mirrors, Underwater characters and Memories and family. The painter thinks… the extras become anonymously collective, they lend themselves to initiating a search ritual and discover that “what we keep silent does not exist”.

Pedro Lopez Morales

Art critic and cultural manager

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