Jose Margulis Venezuela, b. 1970

J.Margulis was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1970, Margulis works predominantly in the medium of Geometric 3D Sculpture, Mixed media, and Photography. Margulis completed advanced courses in photography and master B&W lab work under Ricardo Ferreira at Instituto Neumann in Caracas, Venezuela from 1986 to 1990. Margulis also holds a BA in Management from Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas completed in 1994. He runs a full time art fabrication shop that allows his prolific artistic nature to approach is work with a resolute determination to physically explore the field of geometric three dimensional art. He has participated in several exhibitions and relevant International Art fairs and his art belongs in private collections in Costa Rica, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Italy, Spain, Australia and the United States. J.Margulis resides and works in Miami, Florida with his wife and three children.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I believe that courage, empathy and kindness are all ingredients in a powerful and elusive formula, which arms us with a clean and ever sharpening lens that catches fleeting glimpses of our true nature. My work is about the physical representation of this belief. I digitally design 3-D objects and compositions, and cut them in slices from different types of plastic sheet materials. These slices are then fixed to a rigid canvas, a pedestal or held together in space. Most of my work is done using acrylic sheets with different levels of translucency in a range of colors, graphic patterns, textures and photographic images directly printed on the sheets' surfaces. The bright and fully saturated color palettes to which I instinctively gravitate to, is heavily influenced by the traditional Mexican arts and crafts which made a great impact on me during the time that I lived there. I treat my three-dimensional pieces as light traps or secret blueprints, in which by controlling the placement of its components, I'm able to create intriguing 3-D containers. Their designs are then fully revealed by applying or "pouring" light into them. In a sense, light becomes the ink that reveals the design by following a 3-D template. The light source may vary from natural to one or more fixtures, placed on precise locations in relationship to the subject, with specific power, color temperature, angle and proximity. It intrigues and fascinates me how the object mutates in front of me, with no other resource but a simple change of perspective. Going back and forth naturally, I try to synthesize and integrate different perceptions that coexist as different facets of an object.