Oscar Isaias Contreras Rojas

Oscar Isaias Contreras Rojas, shortlisted in the BBA Artist Prize 2023, is a visual artist from Mexico who graduated from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts and currently lives and works in Florence, Italy. Contreras Rojas’ work is marked by expressive and abstract landscape settings used for bringing out hints of figures that are usually a reference to life in the countryside, travel, and to characters/objects and situations that are difficult to depict. They change as their surroundings depending on the moment in which they are perceived.

It is a spiritual event in free acts, that of Contreras Rojas, a story made up of details, fragments of nature and myth that stand out, liquid, on the surface of the canvas. The effect: a lively, feverish, at the same time aleatory, hope. A new feeling that dissolves in calm in the ages of the psyche of human beings. The movement: sinuous, spasmodic, frantic, circular. In each painting, a gravitational centre gradually appears that moves the scene and expands the tones in magnetic comings and goings typical of the Venetian Lagoon - a latent memory of the painter's studies. Contreras Rojas dissolves matter and recreates every moment of nature in his own way. It imposes an order, gives a rhythm to those bodies that fluctuate-wander-settle-drip into the collective soul. Then, he recomposes them on the canvas, orchestrating new universes in which we are sucked into a pleasant ataraxia in opalescent worlds.

Contreras Rojas has had three solo exhibitions: ‘Racconti Aperti’ at the Crag Gallery, Turin; ‘Atmospheres’, Florence; and ‘Opalescenze’ at the Artcurial house, Milan. He has also featured in international collective exhibitions in Mexico, UK, Bolivia, Norway, Italy, Austria and won prizes such as: Cairo Prize in Milan, Combat Prize in Livorno, and AOP Prize in London.