Manuel Esnoz I Cafe y cactus 2023

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974,Manuel Esnoz is a contemporary artist whose practice explores appropriation,visual translation, and the deconstruction of imagery. He began his artisticjourney in the early 1990s through a scholarship program founded by renownedartist Guillermo Kuitca, later continuing his formation with influentialartists including Martín Reyna and Diana Aisenberg.

Esnoz’s work is built through repetitive and analytical procedures in whichimages are fragmented, reorganized, and transformed into new pictorialstructures. His visual language incorporates references to connect-the-dotsgames, Ben-Day dots, and halftone printing techniques. Drawing from imageryfound in pornographic magazines, advertising, and newspapers, he questionssystems of representation, visual memory, and the very limits of paintingitself.

Translation occupies a central role in his practice. Division becomes a methodof investigation, while deconstruction serves as a tool for knowledge andinterpretation. By transforming found imagery into systems of signs, pixels,points, and fragments, Esnoz creates complex compositions where order and chaoscoexist in unstable balance.

In more recent works, particularly since the exhibition Painting for Robots atKravets/Wehby Gallery in New York in 2018, the artist has introduced newmaterials such as glitter and plastic gems. His use of pointillism and randomstructures challenges conventional notions of authenticity, value, andaesthetic hierarchy within contemporary art.

Several of his works appropriate iconic masterpieces from art history,including Cézanne’s Three Bathers, which he disassembles into brushstrokes,pixels, and geometric modules. The grid, a recurring motif throughout his work,functions both as a compositional structure and as a subject of visualinvestigation.

Manuel Esnoz has exhibited extensively across the United States, Europe, andLatin America. Recent exhibitions include Across the River and Into the Trees(Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, 2021), Painting for Robots (New York, 2018),History of Porn (Jakob Karpio Gallery, Costa Rica, 2013), and Galaxia (Toronto,2009).

He has received several important distinctions, including Young Artist of theYear from the Argentine Association of Art Critics and the Leonardo PaintingAward from the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires.

His works are included in major public and private collections such as theMuseum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, MALBA – Fundación Constantini, theNeumann Family Collection in New York, and the Neuberger Museum in the UnitedStates.

Manuel Esnoz currently lives and works in New York, where he continues asingular painterly investigation into image-making, perception, andcontemporary systems of representation.

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