Chelin Sanjuan
Chelin Sanjuan Piquero, born on May 1st of 1967, in the city of Zaragoza, Spain.
In 1968, emigrates with his parents to Chile, where she will live for five years. Later on they move to Venezuela, country where she will reside until 1987.
Her artistic vocation starts at a very short age. With three years paints insistently -houses, landscapes and dogs everywhere she can paint on, including all her home’s walls-. At the age of seven she shows an amazingly and early way of understanding the perspective and the color usage, being accepted in the studio of some local painters, that work with models. There borns it’s taste for the sketching of the human form, still-life and nature. She is a happy chilc playing with easels and paintbrushes.
Her interest about the artistic world is not limited to painting -she learns to play the piano, the guitar and the four-stringed guitar-, performs as keyboard player in some music bands in the city of La Victoria (Venezuela). Her taste for the music is reflected in lots of her paintings.
In 1985 she joins in “Escuela de Artes visuales Rafael Monasterios”, in the city of Maracay.
Returns to Zaragoza in 1987 and takes classes in the studio of the painter Alejandro Cañada, taking the pre-university studies for the Facultad de Bellas Artes Universidad of Barcelona, where she joins that same year. While in the university, also goes to classes with some painters of the city, including Pablo Mañé.
Back to Zaragoza, in 1991, takes restoration classes in “Escuela Profesional de Bellas Artes”.
She opens her own painting studio in Zaragoza in 1992, where she teaches during 11 years. During that time, she also teaches drawing and painting in “Studio Canfran” and does Jewelry Sketches workshops, for the students of the “Escuela de Joyería Bazan”.
She has cooperated with various publications related with art, for example “Art Teatral”, publication directed by Eduardo Quiles.
She works with the movie director Jose Antonio Salgot, making the Story-board for the movie “Dama de Porto Pim”, based in t he novel of the same name, from the writer Antonio Tabucchi and in various projects for video and advertising.
She has experienced with all the pictorial techniques, from the simple charcoal to the aerography, and during various years she did oil painting, but since 1988 she works only with the acrylic technique, playing with the dificulty that involves the use of that technique for paintings with lots of transparencies and gradations, more complicated to work with than oil.
About her painting style, her surrealist and hyperrealism trends, moved on to some kind of magic realism, mixing reality with fantasy, old elements and new ones, with an optimistic and fresh narrative, full of messages, that give to her paintings a characteristic touch.
Currently she lives in Valencia, Spain.
“…the art of Chelin Sanjuan stands out for its polished technique. Her drawing is clean, with steady and secure lines, while dynamic, showing a balanced and serene usage of color, mainly warm tones. She copes with easiness in the most realistic pictorial lines, but also in more imaginative and surrealist fields. Each painting is an unique world, magical, intimate, with hidden elements and transparent shapes that mix with softness.
The characters -women, children and animals, particularly cats- that appear in her paintings have an interesting close relationship between them, always showing a small point of humor. Figurative art, of sharp and polished shapes, but delicate in the topics and always lively in the contents, without doubt a very personal style, not influenced by gestural and pseudodecorative artistic trends. “A flower in the deserts”, I thought the first time I saw her works.”
J. L Bonet
http://chelinsanjuan.artelista.com/en/
