Alvaro Noboa

Juan Caguana wins Guayaquil Biennial

"My work appeals to the visceral" A very good trade, a curious intellectual scale, pleasant and refreshing eye drops at the sight of all age groups, and the necessary strangeness to generate a special ambiguity atmosphere. These are, according to the Cuban artist Saidel Brito, the features that gave a work like Picnic, the first place and $20.000 at the International Painting Biennial of Guayaquil, Alvaro Noboa 2010.

Brito got the second place and $10.000, but he says he is "happy" because he was defeated by one of his ITAE (Technological Institute of the Arts of Ecuador) students from the, young artist Juan Caguana.

According to what Pablo Martinez, director of Luis A. Noboa Naranjo Museum, informed to EXPRESIONES, the third place and a cash prize of $5,000 went to Kate Vrijmoet (from the U.S.) for Shotgun Accident.

The art and the artist
References and ironies towards art history, current items, and a fascination for mimicry and the forest, characterized the recent award-winning series of John Caguana, a 25 year-old your artist from Guayaquil.

Picnic, the winning artwork awarded by national and international judges, is also a part of this 'cocktail'. In terms of composition-explained the author- it winks at an inaugural work of impressionism: The picnic by the famous French painter Edouard Manet.

"The presence of U.S. troops in the jungle landscape, referred to a speech on the hegemony of power," said Caguana, who has always liked working with the color fields between figuration and abstraction that the forest allows.

Juan Caguana, who assisted us in slippers and shorts in a workshop he shares with four friends and colleagues in the south of the city, believes the artist always poses a story behind every painting. "But the end is not something you impose, is interpreted by the public, " he says.

However, the young painter admitted that the series of four jungle paintings he has done so far, began with the bombing of Colombia to Angostura, where FARC guerrilla fighter Raúl Reyes died. "Since then, I became interested in the subject because we do not know the Ecuadorian jungle, and we have not given it the value it deserves".

According to the jury, it was not the angel nor the soul the painting has what made the artist win the first prize, it was the two-month full time work.

"I always look for something more, local painting is very cold today, calculated. I have not calculated what the artwork can give, I follow my intuition. I do not appeal to the brain, my painting appeals to the visceral," says the artist, who studied three years at the College of Fine Arts and has been attending for four years to ITAE. He began painting while he was a child, drawing TV series characters and cartoons, such as The Knights of the Zodiac and Robocop.

He won the $30.000 first prize at Manuel Rendón Seminario, from the Ministry of Culture, in January, with a painting of the same style of Picnic. In 2006, with an abstraction of police camouflage and a speech on the Fybeca assault, he won the second prize in Salon de Julio.

It was assumed that Picnic was the penultimate work of his satirical series about the jungle, but now he expects to work on four more. He knows he can get trapped if he continues on the same and "it is also too exhausting," said Alexander V. García Review "He has such thorough, angelic, and promiscuous relationship with the process of painting. A great strength. If I had been a judge, I would have given the first prize to Caguana".

Saidel Brito, professor of ITAE, Second Biennial Award.