JUAN DOFFO
Artist statement 

Focusing on his birthplace and using several languages -paintings, photographs, performances with photographs and installations- Juan Doffo has developed a kind of personal cosmogony from which he reaches man with interpretations far away from his geographic territory.

Sometimes Mechita, a small town where he was born in Buenos Aires plains, becomes mitic structures of heaven or hell. Otherwise, Mechita is a womb, cauldron, ravine, and vault. At least, they are all questions about human life. The artist uses some images for reflect and to draw reflections. A thought that soon escapes from reason boundaries: Doffo's works plunge into other ambits, and surround the idea but from sensations. Between the twinkle that grows or extinguish, he express his own self with metaphors, questions related with illusion, passion or both of them.

Doffo sees the world from his own personal experience. From there he builds the symbols of his universe: the unbounded horizon of the "pampas", the crossing of mud streets, the fire, the labyrinth lecture of stars and constructions from thought and culture that he shows as vaults or big silos made with bricks. They are the reason of his ideas, that don't know the limits between substance and physics. Visual reflections about the sense of real, illusion, trivial or transcendent, universal or regional; build the images of his artistic work, mostly centered in a metaphysic look of landscape, transformed in a metaphysic territory. The landscape not as a determinate geography but as a psychic one: the landscape as an exact point where interior and exterior merge with all his questions. The geography of his native land is the furnace where from he constructs concepts that pretend to jump in other lands. It is not a unique space: in there live together reality, dreams and quotations in different aspects of culture. It is the place of transformation and materialization of ideas and dreams. There he talks about the road as destiny, the macroscopic and the microscopic, the certainty of feelings and the terrifying incommensurable, psychological heavens and hells.