PUBLIC PROGRAM | ESTE FOCUS | Pati Fernández and Juanito Conte
Pati Fernández, artist
Juanito Conte, artist
Moderated by Elisa Valerio, ESTE ARTE
This activity will be held in Spanish, without translation.
Pati Fernández
Visual artist born in Maldonado (Uruguay) in 1968. She attended the municipal school of drawing and painting, then attended artists' workshops for long periods, some of her teachers were Miguel Angel Battegazzore, Carlos Tonelli. Among her individual exhibitions, the principal ones were held in Paris, Montevideo, Punta del Este and Pueblo Garzón stand out.
The central axis of her work is painting and color within abstraction. She is interested in aesthetic balance and the relationship between curvilinear (nature) and geometric (reason) forms, working based on color planes, without chiaroscuro, where background and figure compete and complement each other supported by precise and minimalist drawing. Her works are divided into thematic series with a wide range of techniques, painting, collage, installations and sculptures in wood or PVC.
Juanito Conte (1982, Uruguay)
Lives and works in Montevideo.
His work has been exhibited in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, the US and Spain. He integrates private collections in various countries. He has represented Uruguay in the 2nd Painting Biennial in Ecuador 2010. He has had 12 individual exhibitions and has participated in more than 30 collective exhibitions.
“In recent years, Juanito Conte has developed a body of work recognizable by the use of color and the development of a pictorial language informed by printing techniques inherited from graphic arts. These references are evident in the full color, the reticles, the gradients and the 'hard edges' together with the day-glo fluorescents. His research seeks to examine the structures that emerge from this language and propose perception as a conscious phenomenon.
Attention: Perception needs participation, recalled the Catalan artist Antoni Muntadas at the beginning of the century. In his paintings, Conte draws pieces of canvas with color through various technical processes, prints, overprints, engraves, masks and covers surfaces with paint applied with a roller in different ways, to pronounce reflections and generate surface textures. This inventive and laborious process exemplifies his interest in amplifying and composing visual structures. It is the details: encounters and disagreements that provoke discoveries and transform them into larger open questions, in an attempt to transform art into speculation or proposal.” Martín Craciun
Elisa Valerio (1990, Uruguay)
Master's Degree in Advanced Studies in Art History from the University of Barcelona (Spain). She did an internship at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Spain). Since 2019 she has been working in the area of visual arts in Uruguay in different roles. She writes about visual arts for La Diaria (Uruguay) and ArtNexus (United States). She is the Exhibitors Coordinator of ESTE ARTE.