Based in Bogotá, an urban artist Mantilla mixes diverse aesthetic styles with the skills applied to his wheat paste collage, his expressive paintings and a combination of images with graffiti/ vintage-mode photography techniques. These elements envelop Mantilla to express in his urban and psychedelic art pop language.
Mantilla exposes his paintings that pop out of the walls like one form of resolving the vibrant art.
I want to create new themes, provoking new questions as our ideas derive how each of us live the world in our own way”
The repetition of patterns, the overlaying of paper and paints and sensuality, reveal his interests for expressing the intersection of fashion, music and his creative expression. Mantilla grew up surrounded by the artistic world of fashion and photography that influenced him to express his creativity. He developed his taste of music and design in the very early age and this influenced deeply how he perceived the art.
Through his work, he narrates stories of thesis and shares doses of nostalgia accompanied by realistic images. He has a great interest in manifesting his art through women, proposing them in the collages and paintings, decorating walls and graffiti in the city.
Like the sweet and the sour, in his work Mantilla blends the icons of music and the industry and the luxury of galleries and the street culture, taking images, tearing them apart into the paper or simply creating a surrealistic piece and leaving his name on them. Similarly, Mantilla often includes fragments of advertisement texts, yet illegibly trimmed apart and reorganized in his work.
Mantilla is profoundly influenced by the city of New York. He started his artistic career working for industrial designing companies like Curve ID in Chelsea, Manhattan, a well-known neighborhood for its prestigious art galleries. Being surrounded by galleries and artists, Mantilla enters to the world of art assisting local artists of New York City and daring to develop his first collages and graffiti in areas like Brooklyn and Greenwich Village.
He has done several projects with fashion industry such as designers, brands and photographers. he desing a award for a very important foundation in colombia in 2018.
Juan was the invited artists that had painted the mural on the Movistar Arena stadium in Bogota. It’s a major part of his artistic life to paint big murals and walls in the city while he also encourages young emerging artists to go abroad to explore their capacity outside Colombia.
What I saw is that New York, Bogota and Tokyo have artists with so much energy and optimism and there, is somewhere the power of youth can make a change”
Lately, he dedicated himself to exhibit in cities like Tokyo and Rome, selling his works in galleries to fashion designers and collectors.
Juan is the founder of We Art Colombia which is an art collective of young emerging Colombian artists. He has promoted more than 70 artists to travel around the world and motivated them to explore their capability outside Colombia.
We Art Colombia has exhibited in a number of major cities in the world like New York, Miami, London, Rome and Tokyo.
he is very insparid by japanese culture, he is married to a japanese woman, he paint her in a big walls or canvases.
2016 NYC Brooklyn Dumbo RABBITHOLE PROJECTS
2016 MIAMI BLANK CANVAS gallery
2017 MIAMI BLANK CANVAS Gallery We art Colombia.
2017 BOGOTA CUBE ARTSHOP Solo show
2018 BOGOTA Tribeca Solo show
2018 LONDON-5 the old laundry – we art Colombia
2018 NYC Colombia consulate – we art Colombia
2019 TOKYO Gallery 21we art Colombia summer edition
2019 ROME instituto italo latino.(IILA) we art Colombia
2019 TOKYO Gallery 21we art Colombia autumn edition
