BIOGRAPHY
Artistic Statement
"Matter is a territory where form behaves. My work inhabits thresholds and unstable forms that emerge from the friction between the animal, the human, and the objectual. They are identities in transit: bodies that occupy the tense space between plane, volume, and event.
My practice assumes an active continuity between body, environment, and material. In the studio, the ancient and the contemporary settle as layers of a shared living memory. Languages cross and are assimilated through a process of stratified anthropophagy.
I seek a precarious balance in which materials coexist in a state of vibration. It is a commitment to material vulnerability, where the sacred and the everyday meet without hierarchies. In this space, the work manifests as an active presence, always on the verge of change."[EXPAND]
Javier Félix (b. 1976) is a Colombian–Spanish visual artist whose work explores corporeality as language and anthropozoomorphism as a way of thinking. His practice unfolds in the intersection between the human, the animal, and the spiritual, conceiving the body as a territory in continuous transformation. He studied Visual Arts at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, 1998) and completed a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (2008). His training includes classical art studies in Florence and Indigenous and Pre-Columbian arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In Félix’s work, the body is not a stable object but a shifting landscape where identity, memory, ritual, and myth converge. He approaches the figure as an “extraordinary event”: a mutable and ambiguous presence that unfolds and dissolves, holding a fragile balance between what remains and what vanishes. As noted by the Spanish critic Gregorio Vigil-Escalera:
“In the work of Javier Félix there is an encounter between body and myth, between ritual and rupture. Each piece seems to hold itself in a fragile tension, as if about to break and reveal something deeper.”
His material vocabulary is rooted in hybridity, fragmentation, and transformation: breathing layers, shifting surfaces, and figures suspended between the ancestral and the contemporary. For Félix, matter is not a medium but a territory in tension—something that trembles before it appears.
His work has been exhibited in Bogotá, Madrid, London, Lisbon, Santa Fe, Basel, and Florence. He participated in the 16th Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art (2023) and has shown at international fairs such as Volta Basel, JustMAD (Madrid), JustLX (Lisbon), and London Art Fair, represented by Perve Galeria. His work also formed part of the project “Metaphors of Peace” at the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center in Madrid, presenting pieces such as Quipu for Telepaths and Empathies.
A significant moment in his career is his collaboration with the Portuguese surrealist master Cruzeiro Seixas. The exhibition “Connections 2 Afro-Ibero-America” at aPGn2 – a PiGeon too / Art Gallery (Lisbon), curated by Carlos Cabral Nunes, expanded his dialogue with contemporary surrealist practices.
His work has been featured in Revista Crisis, Liceo Magazine, Canibaal, Love IDAA, StyleFeelFree, and in the critical writings of Gregorio Vigil-Escalera, who highlight the way his work interlaces the corporeal, the archetypal, and the symbolic through an intimate and experimental material approach.
