Suecia, 1980
Eric Bocanegra
Eric Bocanegra was born in Östersund, Sweden, on November 25, 1980. When he was 18 months-old he started living in Barcelona with his mother. His passion for painting starts from a very young age, from the hand of his father and from his extensive collection of art books. His expressive concerns arose in his adolescence and took shape with writing, film creation and drawing. When he was 25, after a long period of fruitless artistic creation and unstable life trajectory, Eric finds a pictorial procedure that fascinates and stimulates him.
He develops a style that allows him to give free rein to his imagery, ghosts and concerns. The painting becomes his life. At the beginning of 2015, in collaboration with other artists, he rehabilitated an abandoned building in Barcelona where he currently experiences and develops his artistic projects. He has exhibited in cities like Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin and Göteborg. He has also exhibited collectively. His creations are in distinguished collections such as The Foundation of Painting Pires Cabado.
“…because I believe in painting, I believe in the absolute autonomy of painting and its purity. The painting is autonomous enough to express itself. I don’t think I should accompany my work with words that try to explain what I want to show with it. I do not want to limit the expressive possibilities of my work or condition the emotional freedom of the viewer. I want, need and like that the work belongs fully to the human being who contemplates it. That is why we should keep in mind that art criticism constitutes a genre in itself that is dedicated to materializing through written language a fully subjective view of the matter. We should never see it as an indispensable complement of art. Let ourselves go, let the last redoubt for mysticism (that of unintelligible emotions, that of art, that of beauty) survive and forget for a moment the rational automatisms that drive us to dissect absolutely everything.”
Eric Bocanegra