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Visiting Artist Lecture: September 4 at 7 p.m. in the Greer Garson Theatre
Opening Reception: September 5 at 6 p.m. in the Pollock Gallery
Closes October 2

Aitor Lajarin-Encina

Aitor Lajarin-Encina is an artist, educator and organizer born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain, in 1977, the year of punk. He is currently living with his partner and children, working, playing soccer, and cooking paella in Fort Collins, CO. He received his B.F.A. in painting from the University of Basque Country, Bilbao, and his M.F.A. in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego.

Lajarin-Encina is an interdisciplinary artist whose principal expertise is painting and drawing. Some of Lajarin-Encina's creative work and research interests include contemporary painting and drawing critical issues in the transdisciplinary field, reception and participation aesthetics, poetics of humor, and play. As an organizer and educator, he is interested in exploring intersections between contemporary art practice, self-organizational models of production, public culture and social equity. Recent and current exhibition projects include Crickets at the Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles, Tarta Tatlin at Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico, La perspectiva at Artnueve Gallery in Spain, Piano Room at the Neutra House in Los Angeles and casas at Galeria Distrito 350 in Guadalajara, Mexico.

He is also the founder of DXIX Projects and cofounder of Dinghy Rig with Marius Lehene. Both initiatives are dedicated to the production and dissemination of contemporary culture and art-related projects and materials. Dinghy Rig is an experimental, community-oriented, artist-run exhibition program for and from Colorado. DXIX began in Los Angeles, CA, in 2015 as a curatorial extension of Lajarin-Encina's studio practice and survives now in Fort Collins, CO, as a gallery space in his CSU Art Department building office.

Lajarin-Encina has taught painting, drawing and interdisciplinary studio classes at UC San Diego and UDLAP in Puebla, Mexico. He is currently an assistant professor of painting in the Department of Art and Art History at Colorado State University, where he teaches painting, drawing and socially engaged art practice courses.

Artist Statement

The current series of paintings is a body of work that has an intense, immersive quality and thick existential atmosphere. They draw the viewer into the various dreamy scenes where strange, odd, mysterious events and situations unfold and occur. They are like most of my paintings, visual poems that invite viewers to dive into vignettes of existential suspense that aim to trigger philosophical ruminations about life, interpersonal relationships, and relationships with the environment.

My paintings are made in conversation with the global histories of painting and the popular imagery making traditions echoing diverse references like baroque art, constructivism, satirical cartoons or video games. They appear somewhat succinct and flat on photographic documentation but seeing them in person offers a different impression. They are full of textures, drippings, splatters, etc. Each of these pieces represent an exalted and enthusiastic celebration of the physical and sensorial qualities of the painting medium and a hedonistic homage to the tactility of the pictorial surface.

I typically confront the viewers with intriguing events and situations of multiple poetic resonances that invite them to project their psyches exploring territories of thinking and emotion in relation to their own life experiences. My practice is an effort to find a common ground with the viewer; an attempt to create mutual productive spaces of aesthetic fulfillment and critical engagement in a complicated world during times of widespread sociocultural anxiety. This search is circumscribed by different modes of critique of modernity and contemporary life, its derivations, and its globalized management of both subjectivities, environments, ecosystems, and everyday human and non-human life.

My paintings are devised to be intriguing food for thought and a tactile party for the gaze. Maybe, when nobody is looking, consider gently touching them.