Julio Larraz

Born in 1944, Julio Larraz arrived in New York in 1972 where he began working as a cartoonist for Rolling Stone and Time Magazine. Later he devoted himself to painting. He is a self-taught painter, known for his extraordinary use of white and light. Larraz has a multitude of themes in his work, he captures the instant and the quiet moment where his seductive technique and sense of humor stand out. After living in New York for many years, Larraz moved to Miami and now lives in Florence, Italy. An important monograph on his work was published by Skira.

His work presents cultural and everyday scenes of life in the Caribbean: bullfights, white linen costumes and maritime scenes. He also sometimes uses the brush to allude to the corruption of power and social imperfections; he uses cut-out compositions and obscured faces to make his pictorial narratives a denouncing, powerful, yet ambiguous enigma.

His American Realist influence is persistent and unmistakably drawn from his training as a painter in New York. Like artists such as Edward Hooper, Andrew Wyeth and Giorgio de Chirico, he initially presents us with a work of apparent Realism, but the deeper we get into it, the more we will see an evident complexity accompanied by a narrative universe.