Past
Juan Carlos Quintana
Decadent Decades, Oakland/Albisola Years
January 11 – March 14, 2020
The Fourth Wall Gallery is pleased to present Decadent Decades, Oakland/Albisola Years, a solo exhibition by Oakland-based artist, Juan Carlos Quintana. The works in the exhibition, consisting of paintings, drawings, and prints made during the last decade in several studios in Oakland, CA, show examples of the artist wide-ranging oeuvre. Working in an array of mediums and techniques that emphasizes a satirical world view, Quintana seeks to integrate the visual carnavalesque of urban life with a lexicon of personalized imagery made unique by way of unlikely juxtapositions that underlines a keen social commentary of the times in which we live. Canvases and works on paper are populated by a motley parade of characters which may include heads, skulls, and anthropomorphic objects held together by a whimsical gestural rawness and vibrancy.
Quintana is also showing recent paintings and ceramic sculptures from a current project, Albisola Years 1954-64. With these works, the artist time travels to the decade before his birth and “collaborates” with two artist that he most admires- 20th Century artist heavyweights Wifredo Lam and Asger Jorn, who are living in the Italian village of Albisola, a center of ceramic arts in the late 1950’s and 60’s. While it’s historically accurate that both Lam and Jorn lived and were friends in Albisola, Quintana’s playful insertion of himself into their world challenges the viewer on what is real and what is fiction.
Juan Carlos Quintana was born (1964) in Lutcher, Louisiana, in a region known as the German Coast. Raised on the grounds of a sugarcane refinery and in New Orleans, he has been working and living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 25 years. He has exhibited his works in many galleries and cultural institutions both internationally and nationally including in such places as Berlin, Hamburg, Mexico, Manila, New York, Los Angeles, Habana, Miami, New Orleans, and San Francisco among many others. He has had several solo exhibitions at Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco as well as solo show at John Berggruen Gallery and the Freies Museum in Berlin just to name a few. He is in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum and the San Jose Museum of Art, and his works are included in numerous private collections. He was also the co- founder of the artist run gallery, Random Parts, in Oakland from 2013 to 2016. He is a 2016 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant award, and has just been recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA for the Fall of 2020. This is Quintana’s first solo show in his hometown of Oakland, CA.