Juan Ranieri
Bio
Juan Ranieri was born in Argentina in 1969. He trained as an Architect, he taught the first years of his career, influenced by great references such as Le Corbusier Tadao Ando, Clorindo Testa, Etienne Louis Boullee and many others, his work has always been inspired in architecture and urban planning, and their relationship with social aesthetics and ethics throughout history. by vast public and private collections.
His techniques range from the sharp, geometric media of graphite to the gestural and amorphous ones like acrylic and elastomeric putty, but both hard and gestural worlds always have an ultimately unifying connection.
Statement
I was trained as an architect and I worked in several fields of the profession: design, construction, preservation and urban planning. Computers were not available for everybody to draw plans at those times, so I had to manually draw a lot in order to create technical plans and to show designs to my clients and contractors in a very explicit, realistic and understandable way. All those hours of training helped develop my skills in communicating technical and aesthetic issues. Finally, through paints, canvases, graphite, collage, and other materials, I found a medium for my weekends’ catharsis. At that point, I realized that I was able to express much more through an architectural drawing than a simple layout or a facade, apart from a sort of anthropologic view of the subject. In the last years, after having worked in urban landscape and through its social implications, I resumed the research of how iconic buildings communicate through their basic and essential shapes, specially from their roof plans; after redrawing the buildings from the ground, I found how they can talk about their time of conception, technologies and the way people used and use them. They also talk about the men behind their conception, the social and political reasons that led to a building’s construction and finally, their ethic and aesthetic legacy. With the aim of expressing everything I have stated above in a clean and simple way, symmetry and square supports are fundamentals in my works. I also use a monochrome technique of graphite on paper in order to not distract from the target of my searches and to get an exaggerated chiaroscuro to enhance shapes and volumes. At first glance, it is possible to think they are abstract compositions, but after discovering some details, the entirety of the work takes on its real meaning.
