IGnacio michaud
Ignacio Michaud (Chilean, b June 28, 1979) is a contemporary painter. He received his BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile. His work has been exhibited in multiple group exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Atlanta among other cities. He lives and works in Atlanta, GA.
“My current work began in 2006 when impulse-driven sketches became my way to express my experiences in a new country. With the everyday demands of a day job, I was suddenly exposed to the lives of hundreds of immigrants with origins in Africa, Asia, Europe, East Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America. For the past fifteen years, I have kept more than a thousand of these sketches on sticky notes and used them as the starting point for my paintings. This is a project built on the premise that our experiences can be reduced to bits of information and that a method that relies on quick and spontaneous decisions, when contained, can bring forth greater narrative precision. I believe in the now, the elasticity of time, and auguries. I believe that the realization of an image is the realization of visual truth and I use the surrealist method of automatic drawing to create an index conjuring this matter. In the studio, I manipulate the scale of these drawings to create my paintings. I have chosen this medium to explore and translate a vibrational response to the perception of the present moment. In my studio, I systemically organize these drawings within the square and the rectangle of my canvas, aiming for narratives of higher and deeper precision, as well as original compositional structures that can sustain the dramatic tension between drawing and painting. When lines and colors are placed in a way that enables energy to move fluently, balance is found; balance is inherently dynamic, it is the constant adjustment of line and color. I find myself in the studio wishing to walk through these possibilities as on a high-wire, perfectly at ease.”