Julio Varela

Julio Varela’s work is rich and captivating, resembling a jigsaw puzzle in which contradiction, humour and a sense of absurdity cross paths recurrently. The artist proposes an itinerary that is as rotund as anecdotic and through which he explores the idea of the marginal —not in a socioeconomic sense but rather on a more quotidian level. As he himself states, his pantings are drawings and his portraits landscapes. With an economy of materials that reasserts the artifice of his compositions, his work is characterised by the use of the line and a subtle chromatic contention. The situations that Varela describes bring him closer to the style of the vignette build on quick and lucid brushstrokes that result in an immediate effect of fragmentation.