Jose Antonio Ochoa

Jose Antonio Ochoa was born in Mexico City in 1990. Since a very young age, he has been interested in art, particularly in painting.

In 2009, he obtained a scholarship that allowed him to realize his studies in art. 

In 2010, he travelled to Chicago (U.S.A.) to participate in a variety of courses at the American Academy of Art. 

In 2011 he moved to Sevilla (Spain) to commence his degree in Fine Arts. It is there in the Andalucía capital where he received fundamental academic formation in Art. 

In 2013 he obtained a scholarship to study at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, graduating in Fine Arts two years later from that Faculty. He got his MFA in the same faculty.

Although his artistic focus centred on painting, he also has worked in the realm of sculpting, working with different materials, such as rock, metal, resin, wood etc. He has presented a diverse set of expositions around the world, including in places such as Mexico City, Querétaro, Chicago, Sevilla, Valencia, Zaragoza, Logroño and Madrid. He has also been selected to participate in various art competitions, including the PB Portrait Award, the BMW Painting Prize, or the Parlament of la Rioja Painting Award. 

Contemporary visual culture has lost its capacity for contemplation. While seemingly art has moved away from outdated notions of beauty, my work argues that the sublime is overlooked in contemporary production. Through my painting, I intend to face the visual exhaustion fruit of mass media's violent barrage of images. My optical silence claims the recovery of the intimacy of gaze, enabling the beholder's contemplation. Paradoxically, my source of inspiration is precisely in pre-existing images; my works explore the way in which we relate to them. On the one hand, I'm interested in the narrative ability of images, ambiguity and Umberto Eco's “open work", on the other; I work with the concepts of mystery, veil, tragedy, beauty and the sublime. Lately, I have been enquiring into the relationship and mutual influence of cinema and painting. 

The images of my latest project originate from cinema, with film medium being translated into painting. An inversion of the traditional way, namely, that of painting influencing cinema. I turn to Cinema because its pictorial sense is given. It has already built that image and all the sequence in which the atmosphere of a painting has been put into motion. I explore the way in which film directors have dealt with pictorial concepts, particularly the sublime, and I try to find a way to translate it back into painting. By making use of appropriationism, decontextualization, and relating images from different sources, I intend to produce new and enigmatic narratives that generate questions but don't provide answers.

Find this artist and many more in our collection of Mexican sculptures