Juan Maria Bollé

Lives and works in Vilvoorde (BE)

Juan Maria Bollé is a Belgian artist with Spanish roots. He graduated at the Higher St. Lukas Institute of Visual Arts in Brussels. For the past 30 years his work was exhibited in galleries in Belgium and abroad. His earlier work was made in oil on canvas but the artist switched recently to a mixed media technique.
Bollé is searching for the thin line tween figuration and abstraction. Figurative images are confronted with abstract “colorfields”. Thereby Juan Bollé usually combines several images in one canvas, so-called ‘splitscreens’. By building up different the image in fragments, they become rhythmic compositions and various fields of tension arise. They are “cinematic” paintings, characterized by contrasts between figuration and abstraction.

For the last 4 years, Bollé has been using a mixed media technique, in which he combines photography and painting. The images used are taken from the past and confronted with a contemporary one, allowing them to dialogue with each other. This results in balanced compositions where the viewer is invited to build up his own story.

Bollé is not searching for what makes a painting contemporary, but rather what makes a painting timeless. His paintings are very direct and immediately recognizable, but not unambiguously interpretable. They evoke different associations, are suggestive and characterized by multiple layers of meaning.

As Bollé says, “I seek a dialogue with tradition in order to create at an authentic, contemporary visual language. His works of art are included in various public and private collections.