Javier Peláez

Javier Peláez was born in 1976 in Mexico City where he studied architecture at Universidad La Salle. The artist has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center (Vermont, USA), Casa Nano (Tokyo, Japan) and Casa Wabi (Oaxaca, Mexico). He was co-founder of the independent project Diagrama from 2012 to 2015, focused mainly on contemporary painting in Mexico.

He has participated in numerous shows, art fairs, and auctions including The XVI Tamayo Biennial at The Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca in 2014, The Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time, and LA / LA (Latin American Artists in Los Angeles) with William Turner Gallery in 2017 at The Sonora Art Museum (MUSAS).

Pelaez´s work is profoundly personal and often refers and dialogues with the history of painting. It has shifted through the years from a hyper realistic approach to a more complex exploration of the possibilities of representational painting and drawing where it meets an abstract structure. His paintings almost always suggest a sense of disintegration where diverse pictorial strategies strive to manifest themselves. As critic Shana Nys Dambrot writes, “The Mexico City-based artist explores a visual premise of shifting planes, neuro-cognitive spatial resilience, poetic allegory, and emotional palette.”