Joaquín Restrepo: Anima Isolata

Joaquin Restrepo (1984) is a visual artist and sculptor whose work is influenced by the study of the human figure, industrial techniques, metallurgical-sculptural processes of the last century, and the widespread practices of drawing and virtuality.

His works function as an archaeology of expression and interiority, studies of the body in which using materials with sculptural potential and everyday life scope, closely linked to a contemporary industrial society, he offers a personal vision and deepens the significant collective experiences of the body such as the joy and the pain in gestures. Restrepo often takes important events from industrial societies and the history of representation as his starting point, delving into the burdens and tensions between body, space, and subjectivity.

Restrepo’s work is in constant dialogue with thought, literature and theories of corporeality, and material production of human sensitivity. His intention is to stage, make everyday life the theatre of life, elements of bodily suggestion as a constant reflection of presence and inwardness, through which he comes to propose forms of subjectivity, the collective body, and the significant interior as characteristics of being human.

Restrepo’s work formally looks into the knowledge of human anatomy, volume, and gesture which converse between the construction processes of industrial engineering of the last century, and the addition and subtraction modelling process typical of the tradition of sculpture. The working method of Restrepo gives importance to the value of the material and respect for the craft, to the knowledge in making and the work of an artist in what we can discern as a laborious process, dedicated and disciplined. This principle, which spans and overlaps Restrepo’s entire set of work, reveals his insistence that the work of creating is a constant meditation which carries itself into every detail, focusing on the search of form and therefore, an exercise of thought elaborated from the skills and procedures of the craft. In other words, from the production and understanding of technical processes, Restrepo opens the discussion about the subject who thinks of himself, his relationship with the world, and his possibility to act in the world by transforming it through actions, tools, and technologies.

Particularly in his exploration of the corporal gestures possessed by each of his works, the movement or the subtleties of his figures, we find processes of projection of motor-affective and verbal communication which encompasses dramatic expression, and its reflection in the world. This construction process invites the public to read themselves in an affective way, which fluster the body and one’s own subjectivity.