In his first solo exhibition in Germany titled “Claroscuro” Juan Eugenio Ochoa is showing a series of works, that he worked on specifically for this exhibition. Claroscuro, which is the Spanish word for light-dark, can also be seen as a kind of modus operandi. Juan Eugenio Ochoa focuses on the phenomenon of light, which can be seen as a characteristic aspect of his paintings. To describe it with a term that is based in photography – his motives are all overexposed. The bright light is making it hard for the viewer to grasp the shown details in his paintings as a whole , because the direct light makes ones view blurry. Even in the 17th century the English philosopher Francis Bacon described this matter, that is so pressing to the young artist as follows:
Invisibles, after great light, if you come suddenly into the dark, or contrariwise, out of the dark into a glaring light, the eye is dazzled for a time, and the sight confused.
The phenomenon of light is inevitably ever-related to the shadow, which, alongside darkness, also plays an extraordinary role in all of Ochoas works. The artist is playing with the optical stimulus of the viewer’s eye – and he does it fantastically.
The artist focuses especially on the figurative aspects of the shown and its abstract dimension. In his paintings, he presents an abstract-figurative synthesis, a threshold between the emerging of the image and the blurring its contours in a more or less defined geometric abstraction.
