Julián Burgos is interested in painting as an affective space, where the hierarchical structure of figures in space is fragmented and reorganized within the plane of a painting, suggesting a dissolution and re-configuration of the canons of the baroque. Taking as a reference the language and color of eighteenth-century painting by the French painters Bouchon, Fragonard, or Poussin, the work is decomposed in a manner analogous to the creation of images by digital means.

This exercise leads, in the most recent work, to the consideration of digital tools that mimic within configurations that allude to chaos theory.

On the one hand, it confronts us with a spectrum of figurative parts, in kinetic-dynamic processes of configuration, and on the other, with a total image that speaks of its own formation from the assembly of fragments. These poetic ideas have their origin in the second law of thermodynamics, according to which matter and energy in the universe evolve towards a state of uniform inertia (tendency to zero). The aesthetics derived from complex, dynamic and non-linear systems demand us to ask questions about the very idea of pictorial tradition, which is transformed by the inscription of gestural signs of digital character. As in self-organizing systems, a small variation in the initial conditions prevents us from making future predictions; the baroque image is subjected to the de-compression of the virtual.

The references to visual consumption, to the fragmentation of knowledge and the humor that nourishes the work of someone who does not take any formulation as definitive establish a new reading of the work, whose excellent workmanship takes us back to the traditions of the craft.

Ana Patricia Gómez Jaramillo