Juan Miguel Quiñones

Juan Miguel Quiñones (Cádiz, 1979), he is a self-taught artist who invites the public to reflect on how we use food in our daily lives and he does so in a ironic and playful manner that recalls the strategies of Pop artists and the way they made use of quotidian objects. Similarly to Claes Oldenburg, but with the typical Gaditano sense of humour that characterises him, Quiñones turns any object into a symbol by eliminating its functions and usual meanings. The size, the materials and the transformation of matter are fundamental features in the work of the artist. His body of work is all about images that result from evoking reality in a playful manner, but without really being so.
The first works on marble he produced after his previous job as a sculptor in a import-export business have a clear post-modern influence as it can be seen in the fusion the artist makes of Giacometti and Klein. After having experimented with several styles and techniques on stone, he started using a Florentine technique called “hard stone” that spread during the Renaissance period. Such a technique consist on embedding semi-precious stones in marble. Immersed in this technique, the artist reinterprets this method from a contemporary perspective. Ice-creams, hamburgers, cupcakes made out of stone recall with irony an episode from the artist’s own biography when his mother told him and his three siblings ‘’don’t play with the food’’. And today he actually does so; to play with food and stone.