Artist talk: Saturday, December 2nd | 4pm 

Jack Fischer Gallery is pleased to announce hoodwink by didactix by Juan Carlos Quintana, the third solo show of the artist with the gallery.

Quintana’s work is known to not pull any punches. In this new body of work, he continues to search for a just world. The characters portrayed in his paintings are the heroes and villains of these tumultuous times. The villains are oblivious to the havoc they wreak. He manages to capture the defiance of heroes, which can be lovely and yet heartbreaking, reminding us of the music that is defiantly blissful in the face of adversity.

Artist’s Statement 

We are all hoodwinked into believing in one thing or another. We are schooled at an early age that a certain ideology is best for us that patriotism and love for a country is important or a certain religion can give us salvation. Popular culture has taught us that to be happy you need to accumulate monetary wealth and obtain a certain social status. We are seduced into believing that a so-called “American Dream” is attainable if you work hard enough.
 
I see these paintings as social commentaries or observation of the times we are living in. I wish to memorialize a moment in time where we are bearing witness to the hubris, incompetence, arrogance, folly and violence, in a culture that emboldens racist hate groups and xenophobic attitudes. While the powers that be fervently gaslight the populace, any sense of reason is thrown out the window.
 
The paintings oscillate between being didactic and cryptic. Despite having a dystopian outlook, the works portray a humorous and raucous open ended narrative full of inflatable dancing blow-up men, predatory housing billboards that promote wealth inequality and gentrification, and nouveau riche on their way to a trendy art fair.
 
Juan Carlos Quintana (b.1964, Lutcher, Louisiana) is primarily a self-taught artist raised in New Orleans, Louisiana of Cuban lineage. He is a 2016 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Currently living and working in Oakland, California, he has exhibited in many venues nationally and internationally including at the Jack Fischer Gallery, John Berggruen Gallery, and Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, CA, as well as at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, Skyline College, San Bruno, CA, and Torrance Museum of Art, Torrence, CA, among others. Internationally, he's had solo exhibitions at the Freies Museum in Berlin and at the Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales in Havana, Cuba and various group shows in the Philippines, Cuba and Germany. Quintana has been awarded artist residencies at the Djerassi Resident Program in Woodside, CA, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany and a collaborative residency with Artist Formerly Known As Friends (AFKAF) at EDELO in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-founder of Random Parts Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Oakland, CA. He is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA.