Personal Statement

Andrew Barrios (°1999, San Jose, United States) creates digital media artworks, drawings, and sculptures. By focusing on techniques and materials, Barrios considers making art a craft which is executed using clear formal rules and which should always refer to social reality. He works in mediums and materials that show a reality and down to earth approach to making art. He often uses unique materials and everyday objects to comment on the way that we live our lives. Many of his pieces are intentionally vague and offer the viewer a chance to enjoy their own thought provoking experiences through his art.

His media artworks are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By choosing mainly formal solutions, he creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used.

His works are notable for their finish and for their tactile nature. This is of great importance and bears witness to great craftsmanship. With a subtle minimalistic approach, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

His practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for maneuvering with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of media art: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

His works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.

Barrios is a third year student at San Jose State University in the Digital Media Art Program. He has spent his time there absorbing as much info as he could in order to help him in his future art career. Exploring skills such as coding, game design, image manipulation, 3D modeling, video making, and website designing have allowed him to see the breadth of possibilities that a major such as this has. This program has allowed Barrios to express himself and test his expressive capabilities through bleeding edge technology and the internet.

Although certain aspects of the program interest him more than others such as coding and website building, his ambitions after college are uncertain. If the opportunity shows itself he would very much enjoy to utilize the techniques and skills he has learned throughout the program to explore a career in the arts. At the very least this program has taught him many new creative and problem solving skills that will help him in any career that he finds himself. The only certainty is that he plans to use his knowledge and artistic ability in order to enrich as many people's lives as he possibly can.