Juan Olivares

Biography
Exhibitions

Biography

Juan Olivares (Catarroja, 1973) graduated in Fine Arts in 1997 from the Faculty of San Carlos at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He completed his final year in Brussels at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre.
In 2002, the Ministry of Culture awarded him the Visual Arts Grant at the Colegio de España of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Two years later, in 2004, he was also awarded the Visual Arts Grant by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Spanish Academy in Rome.
In 2007, he continued his training at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York, a city where he lived during 2007 and 2008.
In 2018 and 2019, he took part in the artist residency at ICCI Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. From that moment on, Shanghai became one of his key references and a central place for the development of his artistic research.
In 2021 and 2023, he was invited to the Art Diagonale Symposium in Austria.
In 2024, he returned to Shanghai to join the prestigious Swatch Art Peace Hotel artist residency.

His work focused on the pictorial process itself, creating a poetic fabric that questioned the formal limits of painting and its relationship with space.
Ideas such as transience, the passage of time, the emotional traces of certain experiences, uncertainty, chance, and discovery were always present in his works.
In one phrase: “He loved the emotion that corrects the rule.”

Throughout nearly thirty years of professional career, he held more than twenty-five solo exhibitions in various contemporary art galleries and took part in numerous national and international exhibitions in cities such as New York, Shanghai, Brussels, Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and Rome. He also participated in international art fairs including ARCO Madrid, ARTISSIMA Turin, MIART Milan, ARTCOLOGNE Cologne, Shanghai Art Fair, Arte Lisboa, MACO Mexico, Pulse Miami, and Pinta London.

His works became part of institutional and private collections such as the Ministry of Culture, Swatch Group, Fundación Bancaja, L’Oréal Collection, Repsol Collection, Banco Sabadell Collection, Olor Visual Collection, DKV Collection, Fundación Cañada Blanch, Fundación Hortensia Herrero, Fundación Chirivella Soriano, and Fundación Juan José Castellano Comenge, among others.

Exhibitions

Juan Olivares

Un pam de llum

20 Nov - 17 Jan 2026

The painting of Juan Olivares (Catarroja, 1973) unfolds in the territory of abstraction as an exercise in observation and resistance. Far from the languages of immediacy, his work defends the slow time of the pictorial process and the need to experiment through matter. In Un pam de llum this research is condensed around one axis: light as an agent of transformation, not as a simple visual effect, but as a symbol of inner clarity and the revelation of the invisible.

The artist approaches painting as a space where layers of color function as strata of experience. Each surface preserves the trace of its construction, the marks of a process that does not seek to hide, but to show itself as an essential part of the result. The manual gesture, the density of the oil, the transparency of the pigment, or the weight of color are elements that do not describe an image, but rather produce an atmosphere, a condition of the visible. In this sense, Olivares’s works do not represent but occur, because his painting refers to nothing other than its own existence.

There is in his work a constant tension between control and surrender. Each stroke seems to waver between the precision of one who knows what he is doing and the surrender of one who allows the matter to decide. This duality endows the pieces with a contained energy, a vibration that turns the static into a perceptive event. Light, in this context, is not a motif but a way of understanding the world, a way of seeing through clarity, even when that clarity sometimes blinds.

In the canvases and papers that make up Un pam de llum, painting manifests itself as a space of transition. Forms dissolve without disappearing entirely, as if color preserved the memory of the gesture that originated it. This intermediate condition, between presence and dissolution, is what gives the work its symbolic depth: painting understood as a territory where certainty fades and seeing becomes experience.

Faced with the noise and overexposure of the present, Olivares proposes a practice sustained in silence and observation. His work does not seek to represent light, but to let light happen. That is the true radicality of his proposal: to remember that even a minimal glow, a span of clarity, is enough for the essential to be revealed. Painting, then, does not question the world; it illuminates it.

José Luis Pérez Pont