Page 4 - Diaz Flipbook Complete_Neat

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and
the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement pre-
sented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from
popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mun-
dane mass-produced cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images
of popular (as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal
or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony.
It is also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of repro-
duction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes
visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with
unrelated material.

Pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas
of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion of those ideas. Due
to its utilization of found objects and images, it is similar to Dada. Pop
art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede
postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of postmodern
art themselves.

One of the pop art strategies have been to decontextualize borrowed
objects i.e., extracting from its context a can of soup, a famous piece
of artwork or a photography and by a modification process transform
them into artwork or new artwork.

Arnoldo Diaz creates an explosion of colors thus marvelously obtain-
ing landscapes, forms and objects, all of them pieces of artwork that
can be ideal for home decoration ( i.e. small watercolors or very large
murals) or to become part of an art collection . The Museum of the
Americas, Doral, Florida, has proudly included one of his artworks in
its Permanent Collection.

Arnoldo Diaz’s unpretentiousness and personal humility oppose the
egocentrism of others. Diaz paints just moved by his spirit which,
even when facing adversity and suffering ( he just returned from Ven-
ezuela , his country of origin, after having lived there for some time )
they are not an obstacle to reveal his joy, positivism and hope in each
of his magnificent artworks.

Dr. Raul M. Oyuela, A.FIAP
Director, Museum of the Americas
(Translation byr Martha Beillard, Deputy Director, Museum of the Americas.
Cypress, TC+X, February 2020.

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