Javier Areán
5 km/k series. Cuatro niños en verde y rojo, 2023
Silkscreen on paper
55 x 40 cm
Edition of 14
Published by Anémona Editores
The artist Javier Areán has combined documentary research and artistic practice to create pieces that appeal to individual and social memories, bonding personal experience with collective memory. This exploration aims to detonate a reflection on the present through an evocation of the past. It is a reflection on our ways of remembering and constructing the limits of memory.
Anémona Editores and the author together thought of this concern in the project "5 km/h". The four serigraphies that make up the project are based on images of anonymous childhoods in which it is possible to recognize our own infancy. The work, crossed by patterns of colors and figures, blurs the personal memory and turns it into a collective one.
5 km/k series. Tres niños con puntos rojos, 2023
Silkscreen on paper
55 x 40 cm
Edition of 14
Published by Anémona Editores
5 km/k series. Niños cantando, 2023
Silkscreen on paper
55 x 40 cm
Edition of 14
Published by Anémona Editores
5 km/k series. Tres niños contra una pared, 2023
Silkscreen on paper
55 x 40 cm
Edition of 14
Published by Anémona Editores
Javier Areán
(Ciudad de México, 1969)
He graduated from the New School for Social Research in New York and completed postgraduate studies at the New York Studio School and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. In addition, he complemented his formation with specializations in printmaking, lithography and, photography. In 2013 he founded the Diagrama project, a space where reflection on contemporary Mexican painting takes place. Since 2018 he has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores. The artist has been awarded grants from the Júmex Collection Foundation, The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and, an artistic residency at the Vermont Studio Center. His work has been exhibited in cities such as Mexico, Cambodia, and Spain; he has been selected for the Femsa Biennial in Monterrey and the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial.
In addition, he is part of the collections of the Museo de la Cancillería, the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, the Klaus Museum, and the Museo Nacional de la Estampa.
The author mentions that "I use the archive as a narrative source and research as an interdisciplinary strategy by appropriating photographic images, reinterpreting and transforming them into paintings. I think that contemporary painting must emerge from a questioning of its own nature and its relationship with the social, political, geographical, and cultural environment of the moment in which it is found".