Aitor Lajarin-Encina’s art practice has two dimensions that complement each other—his studio work in painting, video, and other disciplines and his collaborative curatorial and organizational projects.
Through his paintings, videos, installations, and objects, he presents the vignettes and situations of existential ruminations and social satire that invite us to explore territories of thinking and emotion in relation to a wide range of psycho-social and political aspects related to contemporary living conditions. He is particularly interested in unpacking human and non-human existence, everyday life and social behavior, addressing its contradictions, paradoxes. His art practice draws aesthetically from the traditions of painting, comic, cartoon, and popular and amateur imagery to articulates a figurative ludic effort to find productive spaces of aesthetic fulfillment and critical engagement in these times of widespread cultural anxiety. This search is politically circumscribed by different modes of critique of late capitalism, western modernity, and the globalized neoliberal management of both subjectivities and of everyday life.
In 2015 he co-founded DXIX Projects, an artist-run project space in Venice, CA that seeks to contribute to the art context in Los Angeles. At DXIX, they facilitate transdisciplinary exchanges, collaborations, and conversations among artists, curators, writers, and audiences to create exhibitions, workshops, events, publications, and other materials. As a founder and co-director of DXIX, he has been involved in producing and curating a very diverse and inclusive interdisciplinary program that now has a solid presence in the Los Angeles and Northern Colorado alternative art scene. The collaborations at DXIX allow’s Aitor to be involved in providing visibility to diverse cultural productions that are not yet realized while engaging in dialogues beyond the limits established by his own studio practice. He brings to these collaborations his artistic sensibility. His curatorial strategies resemble those of the art-making process. At the same time, his studio work ends up echoing in very intimate ways many of the unexpected learnings that come from these collaborations.
