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Juan Escauriaza: An Uncommon Portrait of San Francisco
Artist in Attendance
415-397-0114
Paintings on display through October
In the mind and in the gifted hands of Spanish painter, Juan Escauriaza, there is no beauty without honesty. With his deftly composed canvases of San Francisco’s urban landscape, he captures the purity of the everyday and the exquisite in the banal. As an outsider looking in, he does not romanticize the American experience nor is he compassionless in his interpretations. In fact, these are the paintings of a man in the midst of a love affair with the overlooked moments routinely shaping the city streets in which we live.
An Uncommon Portrait of San Francisco marks Escauriaza’s second body of work concentrating on the “City by the Bay.” With the eye of a documentary photographer, he instinctively hones in on what makes San Francisco so beguiling. Though he often renounces the picturesque in favor of the evocative, Escauriaza does not aim to merely duplicate the nuances of the city, but instead to give us pause, and to allow us the opportunity to uncover the mystery of the human experience. His facades, though worn with the passage of time, resonate with emotional intimacies and untold tales. Is there beauty in weathered signage or in the shadows of electrical wires that traverse the sky at dusk? For Escauriaza, the answer is always, “Yes.” He sees honesty in the simplicity of those moments, as he shares the quiet stories of each shadow cast and every sidewalk crack. It is this unique sensitivity and vision paired with his dazzling skill as a painter, that allows a forgotten storefront to become a sacred offering.
Juan Escauriaza was born in Madrid in 1961. He has a PhD in Geological Sciences and a postgraduate degree in Hydro-Geology and Paleontology. Though he worked for ten years as a geologist with several important companies in Spain, his true passion was always for art and in 1994 he dedicated himself solely to painting. Since then, he has had over sixteen solo exhibitions, numerous group shows and a major retrospective sponsored by the City Hall of Madrid. His extraordinary critical and commercial success makes it even harder to believe that Escauriaza is an entirely self taught artist.
CK Contemporary is situated in San Francisco’s historic Union Square district where it promotes its roster of noteworthy American and International contemporary artists. We are pleased to offer a collection of original paintings that is on the leading edge of today’s art scene. To learn more visit www.ckcontemporary.com or call us at 415-397-0114.
