Julio Rondo

Renowned Spanish-born artist, Julio Rondo, is best known for translating snapshots of situations and emotions into translucent multi layered glass-painted compositions.

Rondo works with acrylic and spray paint behind glass in a technique he has developed over many years. He pays particular attention to the phenomenon of involuntary emergence of memory. It is, however, not the recovery of the past as a figurative or narrative that is significant for the artist, but the “essence” of stored perceptions of people, events and places that surface in his compositions. Rondo has continued to develop his way of working within the pictorial composition by using a combination of wood panels and glass panes as a layered painting surface. He has mastered and refined this complex technique, and through a partially transparent, partially opaque colour application, he achieves an unrivaled colour intensity in his compositions.

Remaining true to painting behind glass, Julio Rondo’s works continue to move between abstract painting and object-like nature. The dominance of the brushstroke as the painter’s most elementary tool of artistic expression generates his characteristic pictorial spaces, in which the artist captures and preserves not only the remembered past, but an experienced present in all its subjectivity and stringency.The painting assignment is the result of the planning of technology, means and composition prior to the image-creating process and does not correspond to an expressive, spontaneous act of painting. Using his individual visual archive, Rondo uses quick-drying acrylic paint to create impressive documents of a life, which are able to activate feelings, thoughts and perceptions as painting.’ (Text, courtesy of the Artist)

Born in Sontrondio, Spain, Julio immigrated to Germany with his parents in 1962. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Germany, under Prof. KRH Sonderborg from 1974 to 1980 and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Read More