Juliana Ríos Martínez is a Colombian visual artist whose work delves deeply into the construction of identity and collective imaginaries, framed within a critical reflection on miscegenation and cultural memory. Born in Armenia, Quindío, and connected to a strong maternal Indigenous tradition from La Guajira, her practice is rooted in the land, where the dynamics of provincial life and social, cultural, and political tensions become the axis of her compositions.
Her pictorial work is characterized by representations of anachronistic scenes that seem suspended in time, capturing provincial life through an intimate lens. These images, which blend a realistic language with atmospheres changed with visual poetry, engage with the legacy of European pictorial tradition – influenced by figures such as Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzalès, and Mary Cassatt – to project a contemporary perspective deeply rooted in the Colombian Caribbean.
Ríos work transcends the anecdotal, appropriating social realism to address structural issues such as child motherhood, migration, and limited opportunities in the region, while reflecting on family dynamics, death, and tradition. Her imagery reconfigures miscegenation as a conscious cultural process, offering a re-reading of the territory through painting and establishing a dialogue between representation and the context from which it originates.
Influenced by the work of Francisco de Goya and the narrative dimension of Gabriel García Márquez, Ríos incorporates elements of magical realism into her work, achieving a fusion between the everyday and the symbolic, the intimate and the universal. Her creative process, marked by a rigorous exercise in observation, transforms each canvas into a surface for reflection on the transformation of matter and time – essential themes underlying her production.
Through painting rooted in contemporary impressionism, her work provides a critical and aesthetic perspective on peripheral realities, where pictorial tradition dialogues with current imaginaries to question and revalue the spaces, stories, and people she portrays. In doing so, Juliana Ríos consolidates a proposal that, from its regional uniqueness, engages with global artistic narratives.