Venue
John Hansard Gallery
Starts
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Ends
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Address
John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ
Location
South East England

Juan Bolivar's paintings deal with the language of abstraction and formalism making a direct reference to our familiarity with hard edge and colour field paintings. At the same time, Bolivar reconfigures this stylistic appearance to create a playful figuration, sometimes evident, sometimes hard to recognise, like fantasy visions. In 'Geometry Wars' Bolivar presents a new body of work, painted mostly in 'greyscale' and muted tones depicting cartoon-like 'tragicomic' images. Here the palette becomes a filter to show a flipside to the humour associated with his paintings, reminding us, in the words of Peter Ustinov, that comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.