Pictures Within I

Pictures Within I (2025), is one of four works made at the British School at Rome employing mirrors and found objects to reflect paintings, other objects and the room itself. The work consists of four canvases, a mirror and a replica oil lamp. Roman Antiquity was a social and interactive world – which extended to-and-from Murals and Wall painting. The work references the Third Style of Roman Fresco painting where mythological scenes would be inserted into a colour field; with a border indicating these images were pictures within and not windows. These works play with illusion creating spaces extending beyond the walls – in a – quantum space – where multiple dimensions are superimposed in a layered 2D-3D experience, and "virtual reality” blurring lines between inside/outside, reality/illusion – but also ideas of ‘magic realism’, transformation, phenomena as part of everyday experience.

• https://bsr.ac.uk/winter-open-studios-20...
• https://bsr.ac.uk/meet-the-artists-juan-...
• https://juanbolivar.com/home.html