About Nicolás Valenzuela

My work emerges from a dialogue with what is visible and what is felt.

I am interested in the moment when an image seems to arrive rather than be invented—when repeated marks, color, movement, and chance begin to organize themselves into forms that feel discovered rather than designed.

Many of these forms are connected to experiences in nature, ceremony, meditation, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. Birds, plants, animals, fields, figures, and other presences sometimes appear through the process. I do not approach them as symbols to illustrate literally, but as encounters that continue to unfold through painting.

My practice is rooted in the tension between intention and surrender. I begin with a gesture, a material, a rhythm, or a simple constraint, and then try to listen to what the work is asking for. Sometimes the most important decision is not what to add, but when to stop.

Repeated journeys to the Amazon rainforest became an important part of my spiritual and artistic development. Through immersion in the forest, ceremonial practice, and encounters with plant traditions, I began to experience nature less as subject matter and more as presence. That shift continues to shape how I paint: not to represent what I have seen, but to remain receptive to what wants to appear.

I am drawn to the possibility that art can become a meeting place between the inner and outer worlds—a surface where memory, intuition, nature, spirit, and imagination briefly take form.

The paintings are not meant to explain these experiences or fix their meaning. They are traces of them: invitations to slow down, look, and notice what begins to emerge.

I was born in Buenos Aires and now live and work in Massachusetts. My practice moves through watercolor, acrylic pigments, drawing, mixed media, and found or natural tools, with an ongoing interest in gesture, presence, and the intelligence of the creative process.