When alligators eat watermelons and lions befriend zebras:
The Art of Juan Kelly

Juan Kelly grew up in Limon, Costa Rica where he began painting at the age of six. He is well-known in his native Costa Rica and has extensively exhibited his work throughout Europe, America, and Jamaica.

During much of his career he painted realistic Dutch-master still lives and many of the traditional elements in those paintings are still found in his work. Contradictory elements are found throughout Kelly's work: objects and animals coexist in an exotic, surreal world with its own laws and logic. The lighthearted, playful and unreal qualities of his paintings emerge as a deliberate departure from academic realism. Yet his departure from realism into a visual fantasy land is less a denial of reality and realism than an affirmation of life and magic.

When his interest in realism began to wane and he became bored with ordinary subject matter he sought out the unreal, sacrificing accuracy and realism in order to evoke magic. The anthropomorphic expressions with which his animal subjects are endowed illustrate Kelly's preference for the fantastic. The contradictory elements found throughout Kelly's paintings also have a coherence which comes from the subtle relationship among the objects depicted; the old order gives way to new life, to objects that have a new meaning and a new form. The images in his paintings are metaphors for human experience and while some metaphors lie close to the surface, others are buried deep within the paintings and its associations in the mind of the artist.

Kelly uses animals to represent humans in a non-confrontational way. He reveals our struggle for the spiritual through nature. Animals are not Other, but Us, and acting in a way contrary to the way they behave in the wild. Lions are calm, alligators are whimsical. This represents not anthropomorphism, but our very human yearning for personal metamorphosis, the passion to be something we are not, by nature. He does emphasize, however, the magical and humorous qualities of his work that are intended to stimulate the imagination. Kelly's menagerie of creative visions are the type of artworks that stick to your memory banks and refuse to be shaken free.

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About Juan Kelly