Miguel Paredes


Miguel Paredes, Clowning, 40” x 40”, 2009, Acrylic & Lead on Canvas

Miguel Paredes
www.miguelparedes.com
Los Niños

With his Los Niños series of paintings, Miguel Paredes has taken what he calls “the best he has ever created in his life”, his children, and made them the subjects for his revealing drama about the multiple expressions of “self” and identity in today’s global landscape.

The children in these paintings are larger than life, heroic and provocative. Their faces are brushed with an unsettling maturity and a seductive tension.  A decaying culture is at work on an entire generation of young people and the rights of passage are uncertain and even dangerous.

In order to tackle this new world, Paredes arms his children with “jammies”, cap guns, tricycles, graffiti masks, milk cartons and a large slice of “whas-up” attitude.  The children of Los Niños dream of a better world and Paredes’ skill as a painter humanizes the unknown and turns the visual experience into a thrilling, detail infused narrative about the 21st Century.

About the Artist:
Miguel Paredes is a Miami based painter, sculptor and multi-media artist creating work on steel, marble and on thin-screened light displays.  He is a Hip-hop and Anime fuelled digital pioneer who integrates the spirit of urban America with a distinctly Latin American flavor.  His on-going determination to turn elusive new surfaces into expressions of discovery and emotional observation ground him as an inventor and artist.

Miguel Paredes, Writer, 56” x 56”m, 2009, Mix Media on Canvas

With Los Niños Miguel Paredes has taken what he calls “the best he has ever created in his life”, his children, and made them the subjects for his revealing drama about the timeless hopes of all parents and the resolve needed to face the unknown battles of the future.  The children in these paintings are larger than life, heroic and provocative. In the context of such sobering realities as contemporary urban life and global conflict these innocents seem as vulnerable as the artist who has shared them with the world.  The faces in Los Niños are brushed with an unsettling maturity and a seductive tension.  The perilous shadows of transformers charge the familiar with a heightened symbolism.  A decaying culture is at work on an entire generation of young people and the rights of passage are uncertain and dangerous.  In order to tackle this new world, Paredes arms his children with “jammies”, cap guns, tricycles, graffiti masks, milk cartons and a large slice of “whas-up” attitude.  There is a highly sophisticated set of instincts at work in Los Niños and every piece of Paredes’ narrative is pieced together by every detail with nothing left to chance.  The entire experience of these paintings is shockingly honest, risky, and flies in the face of three decades of neo_Pop and post-modern ideas that no image is truer or deeper than the next.  Hopeful, energetic and miraculous, the children of Los Niños dream of a better world and the aspirations Paredes has for them are as thrilling as existence itself.