Andrés BARON (Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Paris. Through practice with film, video, and photography, his approach establishes a relationship with the image transformed by screens and networks, playing with the spaces of representation. He received his MFA from l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. As an artist and filmmaker his work has been presented in various venues and exhibitions including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL), the Edinburgh International Film Festival  Edinburgh (UK), Anthology Films Archives, New York (USA), Images Festival, Toronto (CA), the Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow (RU), LA Film Forum, Los Angeles (USA), Untilthen gallery, Paris (FR), La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (FR), The Island Club, Limassol (CY), EMAF, Osnabrück (DE), among others. He was shortlisted for the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo in 2018.

Relying mainly on film and photography, Andrés Baron’s practice has as a characteristic not to dissociate subjects according to mediums, but on the contrary to cultivate their circulation between different spaces of representation. Baron’s work explores the physical possibilities of body language, gestures, and the tactile interaction with images. These image-elements are often recycled from pop culture and the everyday, for example clothes, decorative objects, popular music. Through their frontal or circular devices, their absence of narration and their deliberate artificiality, the films open a field of great ambiguity, where the filmed subjects always seem aware of the representations in which they participate and the codes that animate them. Andrés Baron further develops the research done in experimental cinema and video art in the 70s by renewing historically formal strategies through contemporary questions regarding the fluidity of genres.

The variation of situations does not only provoke a change in the perception of the subjects: it is the very space of the shooting that is involved each time, through a specific work on the frontality of the poses, spaces and looks which, associated with a constant presence of the flatness of the image (whether filmic or photographic), can sometimes evoke the characteristic forms of art prior to perspective. Thus, although using the apparently classical forms of 16 mm film, video and photography, Andrés Baron’s work testifies to a relationship with the image well after these mediums, reconfigured by screens and networks and aware of their surface effects: always facing the image, but constantly escaping it.

Artist Code: 2111