In January last year, as the United States once again welcomed Donald Trump’s government, Venezuelan artist Juan Luis Landaeta began to feel as if the walls were collapsing around him. The president then announced his decision to cancel the temporary protected status (known as TPS) of thousands of Venezuelan migrants starting November 7, and Landaeta remembers feeling trapped, almost petrified, in a transparent cage the size of the United States. That cage allowed him to move inside without any problem, it also allowed him to see what was outside, but it made him feel like a prisoner.
“For the first time in my entire life I realized that I was the one being threatened,” acknowledges Landaeta, 37, in an interview in his home and studio in the West Harlem neighborhood of New York. “My passport has expired, Venezuela does not have a consulate or an embassy, I have my family far away and many of my relatives have TPS. The feeling is of confinement because I cannot travel, I cannot move freely. But it is also a very effective confinement because I can go out into the street and out of the state, but even so I feel closed in the house.”
Then, trying to express what he felt, he approached the canvas and what seemed diffused began to wear away Lockdown is a vocabularyhis new exhibition which will be presented at the UNAM headquarters in Chicago from November 13th. In it, Landaeta explores scenes depicting threats to migrants in the United States in pop culture silhouettes and vibrant colors. “I decided to talk about myself and what was happening to me,” he says.
His work shows a dissonance between color and the scenes depicted. The pieces in this collection are a compendium of bodies threatened by sharp objects, handled by claws or locked in large glass boxes. They are, however, painted in colors like the pink of Princess Aurora’s dress Sleeping Beauty, the blue of Superman or Elmo is red. For Landaeta this is not a contradiction, but a conscious decision.
Just as pills with a toxic chemical flavor are coated with a cellulose capsule to contain the unpleasant taste – so that people can ingest them and, in doing so, relieve pain, cure an illness or heal wounds – Landaeta chooses cheerful colors to speak to the threats that migrants, especially Venezuelans, face from the Donald Trump administration. “If pop art and its colors are unanimously superficial, this tempts me,” observes Landaeta. “After all, color just exists; you see what interpretation you give to it.”
Since January, under Trump’s directives, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has carried out a campaign of mass deportations, with arrests in courts where migrants are being held accountable for their immigration status and large-scale raids. GOP officials and Trump himself also insisted on the hoax that the then-Republican candidate had repeated in the months leading up to the 2024 election: that immigration would contribute to rising crime in the United States and that Venezuelan immigrants, in particular, should be expelled from the country because of their alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua crime gang.
Landaeta portrays this reality in his work with silhouettes that suggest bodies. If you save on elements like hair, eyes or clothes, it’s because you can convey your message without many distractions. Sharp objects that threaten these bodies rarely touch them; rather, they are exposed as a way to exert control. “I felt marked by everything that was happening and I thought: ‘What do you mark with? With arrows’. Then, trying to make an arrow, a fang came out”, explains the artist.
Landaeta emigrated to New York in 2013, after the death of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro assumed the presidency of Venezuela. That year, the opposition called for massive protests and there was an increase in government pressure on human rights defenders, as well as a consolidation of the courts in favor of the Executive. Landaeta, at the time, was working as a lawyer in Caracas and decided to apply to universities abroad to leave Venezuela. When he finally got a scholarship to New York University to earn a master’s degree in creative writing in Spanish, he left his country. At that time I only painted as a hobby.
Although Venezuela’s humanitarian and economic crisis had already erupted in 2013, not so many Venezuelans had yet arrived in New York. At that point there were about 9,000, according to city data. For comparison: In the last three years alone, since migrant arrivals in New York skyrocketed in 2022, an estimated half of the more than 200,000 arrivals in the Big Apple are Venezuelans.
After arriving in New York, Landaeta, like most Latinos in the United States who seek familiarity in their communities in diaspora or exile, began to grow closer to other Venezuelans in the city and, in time, formed a close friendship with the contemporary artist Jacobo Borges. “I didn’t study art, but I had Jacobo,” he says. “When he found out about me, I was a writer, an interviewer, if nothing else. But I began to understand the formal and technical terms; that’s when I understood the things I sensed and became a visual artist.”
The trip to New York not only gave him the opportunity to be a visual artist and to meet great figures of the Venezuelan artistic tradition, but also reconnected him to Venezuela: “New York brought me closer to myself, to the fact of being Venezuelan. In New York I listened to Venezuelan music that I had never heard in Venezuela. Popular songs, worship teachers, singers from the coast, incredible people that I discovered in the East Village.”
For Landaeta, the exhibition Lockdown is a vocabulary It was an opportunity to find the right language to describe his experience as an exile. For a long time he felt compelled to tell stories about migration, but his first collections distanced themselves from this and focused on abstract art. “I was worried, but my plastic work didn’t inform him very well because it wasn’t figurative at all. I wanted to say something and the first thing I had to do was find my vocabulary,” says Landaeta.
It is its own language, very personal, but it gives rise to reflection, so that the public can reach their own conclusions and imagine other possibilities. “Everything in his work is distorted, and this is an invitation to connect with the other through one’s experience, one’s perspective and one’s body,” says the exhibition’s curator, Ionit Behar.
“Imagination, to me, is the ability to represent new realities that didn’t exist before you,” Landaeta says. For the artist, if the oppressor, be it Trump himself or his government, convinced people to stop imagining, the battle would be lost: “There is a problem that not only has to do with empowerment, but with a question of getting closer to our humanity.”
