Prescillia Milhet
Cristobal Ochoa
"You only truly believe in paradise when you have seen hell."
Cristóbal Ochoa (Caracas, Venezuela, 1986) is an interdisciplinary artist who has been living and working in Madrid since 2022. He studied Fine Arts in his home country (UNEARTE, Caracas) and moved to Paris in 2017, where he participated in several artist residencies. His work has been exhibited in countries such as China, South Korea, Colombia, Mexico, England, and France, among others, and is included in significant public and private collections. Although primarily trained as a sculptor, his oeuvre spans various media, including ceramics, painting, photography, video, installation, and performance. He explores the unusual and often overlooked aspects of daily life, inviting the audience to question preconceived notions and social issues in a playful and ironic manner.
A common thread that runs through his diverse body of work is an immediacy and urgency in his tactile approach to each piece. His artistic practices stem from personal experiences, focusing on themes such as politics, social inequality, fashion, exile, power, and language, while playfully engaging with the viewer's perception and always using the human element as a starting point. Recently, he has been creating pictorial imaginings using a technique he invented himself. He blends the artisanal and the technological, the documentary and the artistic, as well as the introspective and extrospective, to craft his own universe. Playfulness and ambiguity are constants in his work.
"I pour the emotions of my resignations and shortcomings into my paintings. I was both victim and witness to much violence in my adolescence, later I was persecuted for my politics in my country and now live in exile. Throughout this journey I lacked everything and yet I recreate it in my work, which is my paradise. It is a paradise I have created as my refuge, because someone in my situation always seeks refuge and builds it where they can. You only truly believe in paradise when you have seen hell." - Cristobal Ochoa.

About his art
My work consists of several lines of research. I address themes such as migration, integration, language, violence, sexuality, and questions about power in all its spectra. The mediums I use to express myself are photography, performance, video art, sculptural ceramics, and painting. I blend the artisanal and the technological, the documentary and the artistic, the introspective and the extrospective to create my own universe. Playfulness and ambiguity are constants in my work.
I am interested in reaching a diverse audience, especially those who do not actively seek out art. Therefore, I employ various devices such as seduction, humor, or controversy, and in the case of my material work, tactile impulse, optical illusion, color, and organic textures. As a Venezuelan artist, I aim to reclaim the legacy of geometric abstraction but with a more contemporary vision.
My recent research focuses on creating pieces that do not have a negative impact on the environment, especially regarding the technology I have developed to make them. Throughout all my artistic practices, I do not position myself at any extreme; I navigate between oppositions to achieve the much-desired ambiguity. My work constantly evolves according to my surroundings.
Serie : Colour, impermanence and transience
These compositions allow me to speak of vulnerability, transience and transformation. These are fundamental elements of this new phase of my career, as well as in my life. In all my work I seek metaphors that speak of myself and my interior world.
The organic, playful and rhythmic volumes I create seek to trap the spectator in an enchantment I use to explain the inexplicable. I want to submerge the viewer into my imagination through the sinuosity of the forms and the sensuality of the pastel colours or dark colours and their subtle transitions. My paintings are dichotomous, they echo the polarities of chaos/order, stillness/movement, life and death. You can’t tell if they are fighting, fusing or disintegrating, if they are fracturing or penetrating.
In my work, I draw value from the form of the circle and the oval to compose an affiliation between the known and the unknown, these are my musical notes and colour is the rhythm I want to mark.
Kandinsky said about the circle that it was: “the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric into a single form, and in balance; of the three primary forms, it points the most clearly towards the fourth dimension.” From the minimalist and almost primordial use of the circle in the work of Malevich to the nearly scientific use by Vasarely and Assis or the pompous and obsessive which Kusama has given it, or the beauty to be found in the celestial bodies which Kandinsky so sublimely managed to capture in his canvases, the circle has always been a magical compositional element that even in contemporaneity has not exhausted its expressive possibilities.
To create these works I am an artisan and an engineer, the technology I have created determines the results. Pollock’s paintings are as he created them because before him there was no paint that dripped quite in that way, and the drip technique did not permit any other result.
And so I utilize a technology that provides me with a calm and rational mode of expression which at the same time is expressive and emotional. Thanks to this technique I cover large dimensions that would otherwise be very difficult, as well as polluting and costly. So although the result is traditional paint upon canvas, I use magnets, metal, “ecological“ paints and technology to achieve my results. I avoid techniques like screen-printing (highly polluting).
Artwork
2022
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2022
2020
2019
2016
2014
2013
2011
2010
2009
Solo and Group Exhibition; Art Fair
Group Exhibition - "Remasks" Mairie de Paris Centre, Paris, France.
Group Exhibition - “Artistic Freedom, Censorship and Exile” Châtelet Theatre, Paris, France.
Solo exhibition - “Paris dresses in wood” 9, Opera Hotel Gallery, Paris, France.
Group Exhibition - “Visions from Exile” Festival, International City for the Arts, Paris, France; “Nature’Art”, Espace Commines, Paris, France.
Solo Exhibition - Wanderlust “Errances”, Leonor Parra curator, Ibu Gallery, Paris, France.
Group Exhibition - “Open Doors Artists In Exile” Atelier, Paris, France.
Group Exhibition - “Experimentum Y”, Mariela Lairet Curator, Cultural Center, Lima, Peru.
Solo exhibition - “Interclusiones” Exhibit, Viloria Blanco Gallery, Maracaibo, Venezuela; “Estar” Exhibit “Los Conos de Madre” performance, Beatriz Gil Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela.
Group exhibition - “Distorssions XVIII” Intersection of the Literary Creation, Ursula Rey Curator, Carora, Venezuela.
19th Salon of Young Artists Iberoamerican Art Fair (FIA) Museum of Contemporary Art, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
Solo exhibition - “Cristobal Ochoa, Pérouges House of Contemporary Arts” Residency followed by Exhibit, Lyon, France.
Group exhibition - “Axis of Freedom” Exhibit, Lorena Gonzalez Curator, El Hatillo Center for the Arts, Caracas, Venezuela; “Oficina de San Jeronimo” Eduardo Arroyo Curator, Casa del Lector, Matadero Contemporary Art Center, Madrid, Spain; “Organica”, Susana Benko Curator, Integrated Arts Center, Caracas, Venezuela.
Solo exhibition - “Symbiosis”, Los Galpones Art Center, Caracas, Venezuela.
Group exhibition - “Venezuelan Artists” Exhibit, Xein Jeno Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; “Zibo MACSABAL” Symposium, Zibo, Jinan, China.
Solo exhibition - “Proyections”, El Gato Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia.
Group exhibition - “Black and White”, Fernando Zubillaga Gallery, Los Galpones Contemporary Art Center, Caracas, Venezuela.
Solo exhibition - “Enconos”, La Guayaba Verde, Caracas, Venezuela; “Introyeccion”, Multiple Gallery for Contemporary Art, Caracas, Venezuela.
Group exhibition - “One, Multiple and Variants”, Multiple Gallery for Contemporary Art, Caracas, Venezuela.
38th National Salon of Fire Arts, Carabobo University, Carabobo, Venezuela; “Los Conos de Madre” Performance, In the Middle of the Street Urban Festival, Caracas, Venezuela; “Actions, Reactions and Visions”, Gallery 39, Caracas, Venezuela; “Contemporary Ceramics”, GSeven Gallery, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Los Galpones. Caracas, Venezuela.
Group exhibition - Participant in the First Paper Biennial, Braulio Salazar, University Gallery, Valencia, Venezuela.
Group exhibition - Participant at the 36th Salon of Fire Arts, Braulio Salazar University Gallery, Valencia, Venezuela.
Awards and activities
Perfomance/atelier, Palais de Tokyo,Paris, France.
Artistic Residency, CCAS. Le Monetier Les Bains, France.
Artistic Residency, Chateau de la Haute Borde. La Loire, France.
Artistic Residency, Centre Intermondes. La Rochelle, France.
Bourse Regards d’ailleurs ADAGP. Paris, France.
Armando Reveron Young Artists Prize, AVAP (Venezuelan Association of Visual Artists)
First Prize “Translations” Art Festival, Brighton, United Kingdom.
Omar Carreño Prize for Young Artists, Venezuelan Architects Association.
First Prize of Urban Art. Caracas, Venezuela.
ACAF Distinction (Carabobo Association of Fire Arts) 38th National Salon of the Fire Arts, University of Carabobo, Venezuela.
“I Was Yesterday/ Today I Am” Distinction, Urban Category, sponsored by Coca-Cola Company, Caracas, Venezuela.
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