LALANNE
Statement / Featured Work / Bio
"I merge myth, history and visual culture to shape a language that interprets our shared world."
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The Work of Joaquín Lalanne
Joaquín Lalanne works within a territory where art history, contemporary visual culture, and personal memory intersect without asking permission. His paintings function as stages: precise, almost theatrical architectures where classical statues, ancient mythologies, pop icons, everyday objects, and figures from different eras coexist in the same present.
His work does not illustrate stories: it constructs systems of correspondences. A Greco-Roman bust can dialogue with a Coca-Cola bottle, a checkerboard floor can open onto a metaphysical Mediterranean, or an ancient hero can coexist with the Pink Panther. Lalanne uses contrast as both visual and conceptual engine: the solemn with the banal, the mythical with the domestic, the archaic with the industrial. Everything integrates into a single logic: the symbol as a bridge across time.
His painting stems from obsessive observation—of form, time, and identity—but also from play and irony. Each work is a mental labyrinth, a space where global culture, the remains of past civilizations, and intimate biography overlap like layers. It does not seek to provide answers: it proposes maps.
Lalanne works with careful attention to detail, light, and composition, yet with a constant desire to discover his own language: a visual grammar capable of uniting rigor, humor, myth, and history in images that are both clear and enigmatic.
Ultimately, his work is an exploration of the ways we think, remember, and construct meaning in a world saturated with signs.
Day at the Market
In Day at the Market, Joaquín Lalanne turns a Mediterranean terrace into an impossible museum, where centuries of art coexist within a single luminous scene. Like a pictorial cabinet opened to the sea, the classical, the modern, and the contemporary converse without hierarchy.
In the foreground, Jeff Koons’s lobster dominates the scene opposite a still life of fruit: the juicy and everyday confronting the monumental and kitsch. Behind it, Perugino’s two figures introduce the harmony of the Quattrocento, while Picasso’s ceramic bull links tradition to modern experimentation.
Beneath the arches, Canova’s Venus and Mars anchors the axis of classicism, accompanied by a Calder mobile that brings the mathematical lightness of modernity. The lateral walls complete this constellation: Miró, Calder, Color Field painting, and Botero transform the terrace into a gallery of echoes, rhythms, and correspondences.
The entire ensemble functions as a metaphor for the cultural marketplace: a place where Greek myths, the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Modernism, and contemporary art overlap like the strata of a shared memory. Lalanne condenses here his vision of art as encounter and continuity: a space where images from the past return to be seen anew under Mediterranean light.
Three Truths
In Three Truths, Joaquín Lalanne constructs a setting where art, faith, and history—humanity’s three great truths—coexist within a single fragile architecture. The space, held together by wood, nails, and tape, opens like a theater of existence: precise and luminous, yet precarious, reminding us that we inhabit a world that never fully belongs to us.
In the foreground, two archaeologists excavate a checkered floor. Their discovery reveals Magritte’s pipe and Dalí’s mustache—symbolic fragments of art history turned into cultural fossils. To one side, the portrait of Howard Carter—discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb—watches over the scene as a guardian of memory.
In the background, three robed figures evoke faith, that human need to believe in the invisible in order to give meaning to existence. To the right, a contemporary artist draws the Michelin Man on a white wall, embodying modern irony: the ability of art to transform the banal into a symbol.
Lalanne weaves together these three planes—the archaeological, the spiritual, and the creative—to build an allegory of the contemporary human being: absorbed in his own pursuits, indifferent to the fragility of the world that contains him. Thus, Three Truths rises as a mirror of our condition: we live among ruins and fictions, searching for meaning in the remnants of time.
Delicate Instant
In Delicate Instant, Joaquín Lalanne constructs a scene that oscillates between revelation and bewilderment. On a checkered floor that multiplies depth, three symbols meet in a tense equilibrium: a Venus de Milo, an Ionic column, and a Coca-Cola bottle crowned by an owl. The sacred, the classical, and the banal coexist as if time had frozen an instant before interpretation.
In the background, the shadow of Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead opens a portal toward the enigmatic. The Venus contemplating it seems to confirm De Chirico’s famous intuition:
“The statue floods its soul in the contemplation of its own shadow.”
This metaphysical echo underscores the tension between presence and absence, between appearance and mystery.
The owl—an emblem of wisdom but also of omen—introduces a decisive ambiguity: guide or threat. The Coca-Cola bottle, an image Dalí incorporated in the 1940s, reminds us that brands, like statues, also become cultural ruins.
In front of them, a man seen from behind pauses, startled before a revelation that does not reveal itself. This gesture suspends the scene and gives the work its name: the instant just before understanding something that has not yet allowed itself to be said.
Welcome
In Welcome, Joaquín Lalanne erects a Gate of History: a cardboard structure assembled with visible nails and tape, inspired by the Brandenburg Gate and by the temples of the classical world. On the frieze, two Venus de Milo figures and two Campbell’s soup cans crown the entrance as guardians of a new mythology—one that unites antiquity with mass culture. Beneath its apparent monumentality pulses the fragility of stagecraft, a constant in Lalanne’s universe.
Beyond the portico, as if they had just crossed the threshold of time, advance three key figures in the history of archaeology: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, father of modern archaeology; Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the ruins of Troy; and Robert Koldewey, who unearthed Babylon and the celebrated Ishtar Gate. The meeting of these characters—solemn and almost theatrical—evokes humanity’s faith in the pursuit of knowledge and the stubbornness of those who dedicated their lives to reconstructing the remnants of civilization.
But the scene fractures with the irruption of the leopard man. His figure, both comic and menacing, introduces a note of irony: history reveals itself as a stage where erudition and absurdity coexist without hierarchy. The archaeologists, startled, seem to flee—not from danger, but from the uncertainty that accompanies every discovery. For the painter, he also embodies the revenge of the mystical world against Western colonialism.
With Welcome, Lalanne turns archaeology into a metaphor for artistic creation: the exploration of remnants, the reconstruction of the past, the stubborn will to find meaning. This gate is not only the threshold of history, but also the entrance to the artist’s own imagination, where reason and artifice meet under the morning light.
Philosophical Morning
In Philosophical Morning, Joaquín Lalanne transforms a seaside terrace into a theater of opposing forces. Upon the checkered floor—symbol of order and measure—stand two cardboard statues embodying Apollo and Dionysus, the spirits that Nietzsche saw at the root of all creation: rational clarity and instinctive impulse.
The characters inhabiting the scene oscillate between these poles: some engage in solemn dialogue, others surrender to Dionysian movement. At the center, a young man tied to a post recalls Ulysses confronting the sirens’ song: reason binding itself so as not to yield to the vertigo of desire, as Freud might suggest.
Framed by curtains that reinforce its theatrical nature, the work captures the moment in which the light of thought and the force of instinct coexist in a fragile and inevitably human equilibrium.
The Garden of Asterion
In The Garden of Asterion, Joaquín Lalanne transforms myth into a contemporary cultural labyrinth. The white, geometric, silent space evokes Borges’s house of the Minotaur: a mental architecture where identity is built between memory, imagination, and bewilderment.
Within this ascetic order appear objects and figures from disparate worlds. Theseus, with helmet and spear, advances like the inevitable visitor of the myth; a monarch butterfly suggests transformation; an ancient map offers orientations that never fully clarify anything. The Pac-Man ghost introduces play, irony, and digital culture as part of the same symbolic maze.
To one side, a large ritual candelabrum—more sign than object—reinforces the idea of a light that guides but does not resolve.
In the background, a caravel sails the Mediterranean with silent confusion: a symbol of the “discovery” of the Americas, it appears displaced, arriving at a shore where a tower already stands, a world already formed. It discovers nothing; it arrives late, turned into an emblem of wandering rather than conquest. This small historical displacement opens a fissure where myth, colonization, and global culture merge as parts of the same mental labyrinth.
The result is a scene in which the mythical, the historical, and the pop coexist without hierarchy. Lalanne turns Asterion’s labyrinth into a mirror of our own complexity: an inner territory where we search for meaning while moving through symbols that overlap, contradict one another, and ultimately reveal us.
Path of Giants
In Path of Giants, Joaquín Lalanne constructs a personal mythology where the intimate and the cultural intertwine as part of the same journey. Against the luminous landscape of Cadaqués—transformed here into a legendary territory—coexist a heroic bust from Antiquity, a solitary camel, the iconic geometry of a Coca-Cola crate, and the figure of the ao ao, a creature from Guaraní lore that the artist recasts as an ambiguous guardian: familiar and threatening at once.
The work brings together symbols that have accompanied the painter throughout the years—objects that, once detached from their origins, become emblems of an interior narrative. At the center, two figures rise like small bottles inside a soda crate: an image that speaks both to consumer culture and to the fragility of identity in a world saturated with signs. At the same time, these same figures—the painter and his partner—travel in an old car driven by the Pink Panther, as if myth were being rewritten in a playful register while they advance toward an open future.
Historical, popular, and personal elements coexist without hierarchy, forming a symbolic landscape that is at once memory and fiction. Path of Giants proposes a reading of the world as a territory where inherited myths and personal myths coexist, collide, and transform, inviting the viewer to recognize themselves in that passage between the real and the imagined.
A Long Day
In A Long Day, Joaquín Lalanne arranges a visual cartography of contemporaneity. The grid that structures the surface functions as a board on which images from different eras—Greek temples, symbols of political power, scenes of war, symbolic animals, pop icons, human gestures, archaeological remains—coexist as fragments of a single fractured narrative.
At the center, a small theatrical platform brings together a painter and a group of onlookers: figures who seem to question the meaning of this mosaic-like world. Painting thus appears as a point of pause, a place to look, think, and reassemble what history, politics, and the media disperse.
The work juxtaposes the solemn and the trivial, the ancestral and the immediate, the warlike and the playful. The White House rendered as a photographic image, a tiger about to attack, a carefree Mickey Mouse, Nietzsche, an owl, soldiers, landscapes, the remnants of empires, abstract stains, and geometric signs: everything coexists without hierarchy, as simultaneous layers of a shared collective consciousness.
A Long Day does not attempt to resolve this chaos but to reveal it: the contemporary world as an infinite accumulation of stimuli, narratives, and historical ghosts. In that tension between saturation and analysis, Lalanne proposes an act of resistance: to observe, to think, to bring order—if only for a moment—to what seems ungraspable.
As the Day Stands
In As the Day Stands, Joaquín Lalanne composes a board where history, culture, and myth overlap as active layers of the present. The grid of colors—somewhere between pop and abstract—functions as a stage where distant civilizations coexist on a single plane: a tense dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary.
Two Greek warriors flanking a classical vase evoke Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, that foundational struggle from which history is born. Not far away, Hegel appears in portrait, looking forward, while the myth of Danaë reminds us that every era generates the forces that will eventually displace it, as if each historical phase carried within it the seed of its own surpassing.
In contrast to that idea of orderly progression, the burning plane headed toward a smiling Mickey introduces a more unsettling reading: history as collision, interruption, accumulated ruin. This tension—between progress and catastrophe—suggests the fragility of current powers and the sense of a world in permanent transformation.
Also present are a Huastec figurine, Egyptian and Roman figures, classical scenes, symbolic animals, and the metaphysical architecture of a portico: cultural fragments no longer organized by origin but by resonance, like an open archive of collective memory.
At the bottom, African hunters and Roman women running out of the frame trace a temporal arc from the remote past toward the future, alluding to shifting social roles and the search for new ways of inhabiting history.
The photographer recording the scene synthesizes the gesture of the work: an attempt to capture this moment in the world—complex, contradictory, and in transformation. As the Day Stands observes contemporaneity as a field where narratives intersect, erode, and rewrite themselves without cease.
On the Run
In On the Run, Joaquín Lalanne constructs an almost theatrical space where color becomes the protagonist. The red, yellow, and black planes—Hard Edge in spirit—create an atmosphere of suspended tension: a sharp stage where something has just happened or is about to occur.
At the center, a woman looks at the viewer as if caught in the midst of an inner passage. Around her, three elements condense distinct symbolic forces: the wild horse projected on the wall, emblem of impulse and escape; the hourglass marking a time that slips away; and the hand emerging from the shadows holding a phone, a gesture that introduces an impossible call, a message from another realm.
The austerity of the space amplifies each sign, turning the scene into a meditation on vertigo, loss, and the irruption of the unexpected.
The Philosopher
In this bronze sculpture, Joaquín Lalanne brings together several motifs that traverse his imagination: classical culture, the symbols of modernity, and the human condition understood as a question. Atop an Ionic column—an emblem of inherited knowledge and of elevation through thought—rests a Volkswagen Kombi, icon of travel and life in transit.
Above it, a monkey looks at the viewer with an inquisitive expression. It is not an ironic figure but a mirror: that primate, Dawkins would say, is ourselves—the creature that questions, that advances, that hesitates.
At the base of the column, a single Coca-Cola bottle stands apart from the ensemble: an everyday object turned into a metaphor for the individual who separates from the crowd. In dialogue with Heidegger and Ortega, Lalanne suggests that the “being who inquires into being” is always the one who steps aside, the one who finds a singular way of inhabiting the world.
Together, the column, vehicle, monkey, and bottle form a small contemporary myth: a parable about the inner journey, about the consciousness that rises, and about the strange mixture of culture, biology, and consumption that shapes our existence.
Biography
Joaquín Radío Lalanne (Buenos Aires, 1989) is a Uruguayan artist whose work weaves together classical tradition, philosophical inquiry, and contemporary visual culture. Born to Uruguayan parents, he returned to Montevideo at the age of two, where he grew up and received his early artistic formation.
He trained in the studios of Miguel Herrera, Álvaro Amengual, Clever Lara, and Óscar Larroca.
In 2008 he travelled to Cadaqués to work alongside the painter Ignacio Iturria, an experience that profoundly shaped his visual language.
In 2009 he was selected by the Antonio Gala Foundation (Córdoba, Spain), where he completed a nine-month residency.
He later pursued academic drawing studies at the Taure Academy in Barcelona (2012–2016).
He subsequently undertook personal periods of study and research of four months in Rome (2019) and six months in Florence (2023), immersing himself in the work of the Italian masters and in the broader European pictorial tradition—experiences that continue to nourish his artistic development through direct and sustained engagement with art history.