About

I paint from memory. Every series starts with a text I write before touching the canvas: a short story, a chronicle, sometimes just a list of names. That text becomes a drawing, and the drawing becomes a painting. I have worked this way since 2008, when, in Edmund Valladares's studio in Buenos Aires, we developed a method that unites writing, drawing and colour.

Cubism is my foundation. It is where I order the structure of the painting, and onto that structure I pour the expressionist wound I learned from Goya and the flat, direct colour of Latin American pop. I don't tie myself to a single language: each project asks for its own, which is why I combine schools.

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1978, two years after the military coup. Words like the disappeared, repression or Operation Condor settled in my memory before I could understand them. Much of my painting tries to give them back their weight. In the series about the dictatorship I work with a “negative” palette, colours that do not match what they depict, so that the eye lingers on what we would rather not see.

My painting follows the course of a social discourse: that of the people official history leaves nameless. I seek a faithful commitment between the work and what I think, so as not to be a satellite observer of reality.

Claudio Rojas (Buenos Aires, 1978) is an Argentine painter who lives and works in Barcelona. Trained as an art director, he came to painting through Cubism in the studio of the master Edmund Valladares, where he studied for six years and developed the method that guides his work: each series begins with a text of his own that is translated into drawing and, finally, into painting.

In 2009 he travelled through Latin America for several months before settling in Reggio Emilia (Italy), where he joined the group of artists at Via dei Due Gobbi 3. He has lived in Barcelona since 2012, where he is a member of the Estesia collective.

His work, which has received awards in Buenos Aires and Reggio Emilia and an honourable mention at the 50th Salón de Otoño in Valencia (2019), builds a pictorial archive of Latin American memory: the Argentine dictatorship, Operation Condor, Andean cultural resistance and the literature of Julio Cortázar.