Ecuador // London
Ulises Valarezo is a visual artist whose practice focuses on figurative painting. He was born in Ecuador and currently lives and works in London. At the age of 16, he migrated with his family to Spain, where he began his artistic training in Murcia at the studio of the painter José Manuel Peñalver. He later received a scholarship to specialize in classical painting at the Artium Peña Academy in Madrid.
Between 2019 and 2022, he studied Fine Art at Middlesex University in London, where he obtained a BA (Hons) Fine Art, First Class degree. With more than twenty years of dedication to painting, his work develops through an ongoing investigation of image, perception, and memory, approaching painting as a space for the transformation of pre-existing images over time and through lived experience.
My practice understands figurative painting as a question of perception rather than representation. I am not interested in depicting a specific event or preserving memory as a fixed image, but in examining how images are formed, transformed, and reactivated within consciousness over time.
I work from pre-existing images (photographs, archives, or visual records) which I use as starting points to analyse how an image loses stability once it ceases to function as a document. By blurring and translating these images into paint, I deactivate their documentary authority and their promise of clarity. This process does not aim to obscure information, but to question the image’s status as evidence.
Through painting, these images are embedded in a temporal and bodily process in which form is simultaneously constructed and eroded. What I investigate is not the content of the image, but its mode of appearance within perception: an intermediate state in which the image remains recognisable yet resists definitive fixation. My work operates at the intersection of perception and memory, understood not as stable repositories, but as active and variable processes that shape how images are produced, remembered, and interpreted.
