Enio Arroyo Gomez

Lives and works in Barranquilla, Atlantico, Colombia

Artist statement

My practice is rooted in play as a way of accessing subconscious impulses and drawing the viewer into a game whose rules are not immediately clear. I make automatic drawings daily, letting intuition lead. While my work is mainly figurative, it resists accurate representation. I construct a deliberately childlike visual language, pairing it with carefully researched color palettes drawn from historical images and visual traditions. I use this seemingly naïve language to approach darker aspects of the human experience: desire, pain, violence, oppression, and fear. I am interested in poking at the viewer in subtle, almost incidental ways, letting unease accumulate until it becomes difficult to ignore. My practice develops through experimentation as I move between drawing, painting, and small-scale sculpture, using conventional, self-made, and found materials. I create in series, and each project becomes an obsession: I find myself reading for hours, spending entire days inside museums, or flipping through endless images. I embed biographical symbols into the work, allowing personal references to accumulate meanings beyond their original context. What first appears as a field of strawberries gradually reveals itself as a scene of violence.

Artwork