About
I don't paint answers.
Answers end conversations. I would rather begin one.
My paintings are places where things that are not supposed to coexist somehow do: beauty and discomfort, order and chaos, memory and invention, humor and seriousness, figuration and abstraction. I don't see these as contradictions. I see them as reality.
I build paintings through accumulation. Color arrives first, then fragments, figures, symbols, words, interruptions, accidents. Some elements survive. Others disappear beneath layers of paint. I revise, cover, expose, destroy, and rebuild until the painting begins to develop an intelligence of its own.
At some point, I stop being completely in control of it.
That's usually when it becomes interesting.
I have never been particularly interested in reproducing what the eye already knows. A figure doesn't have to behave like a portrait. A landscape doesn't have to describe geography. A word doesn't have to remain language. Everything can become material.
Color especially.
For me, color is not decoration. It can organize a painting, destroy its hierarchy, create rhythm, contradict an image, seduce the eye, or deliberately send it in the wrong direction. Sometimes color explains what the subject cannot.
Memory works in much the same way.
It edits without permission. It exaggerates. It erases. It rearranges. It can transform an ordinary afternoon into something monumental and an entire decade into a single image. Painting gives me a way to work inside that instability rather than trying to correct it.
Perhaps that is why traces matter so much in my work. I allow previous decisions to remain visible because paintings, like people, should carry evidence of what happened to them.
My work has traveled farther than I ever expected it to—through exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, London, and Tokyo, and into museum exhibitions in California and Japan. It has been juried, awarded, published, collected, loved, misunderstood, and occasionally looked at in ways I never anticipated.
Good.
I don't want to tell someone standing in front of one of my paintings what to think.
Stay with it.
Look again.
Find something I didn't put there.
Because the moment you do, the painting is no longer entirely mine.
Carlos Buitrago
California