José Manuel Barahona Pérez

CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE ARTIST |

La Rioja and Navarra, Spain | Béarn, France

José Manuel Barahona Pérez (1992) is an autodidactic contemporary artist, active since 2010, who specialises in figurative painting and sculpture. His work evokes baroque, classical and naturalist art. His accomplishments as a portraitist stand out, in which he reinterprets and revalues classic motifs with his subtle use of colour (which he understands as a materialization of light), his handling of perspective, the strength of expression of his characters and the harmony with which they visually relate to their surroundings. He mainly works with oil, acrylic, tempera, watercolour and charcoal, as well as with wood, stone and clay. Passionate about historical themes, one of his greatest ambitions is to vindicate the notion of timelessness in painting and sculpture, using a new visual language, built on the basis of traditional elements.

Born in Peru to a Spanish mother and a Peruvian father, Barahona Pérez spent most of his adolescence in a small village in northern Spain. At the age of eighteen, he began carving wood, sculpting stone and modeling clay in Josu Goia Etxeberria's studio. A year later, he moved to Paris on his own where he met the Spanish artist Ricardo Sanz, who encouraged him to follow his vocation as a painter. Not having the means to pursue academic training, for several years he made drawings of individuals in the streets of Paris and regularly visited museums, copying portraits in classical style. At the age of twenty-four he returned to Spain and settled in San Sebastián, where he participated in several exhibitions, including Memorias, a solo exhibition about his experiences in France, organized by the Etxalar town council. For several years he drew and painted to live on an itinerant basis, visiting various cities in Spain and making drawing and painting his main activity.

From the age of twenty-eight he began to take on increasingly important commissions from public figures related to Spain’s cultural world. Thus he painted various religious paintings for churches and convents and portrayed musicians, politicians, artists and writers. At the beginning of 2024 he illustrates the novel Cristóbal by the Peruvian writer Gabriel Núñez del Prado. Shortly after, his portrait of the Carlist José Ignacio Santa Cruz was acquired by the Carlist Museum of Madrid and the Viana city council included his portrait of the writer Francisco Navarro Villoslada in its permanent collection. His works appear in print and digital publications from La Rioja, Navarra, Castilla, León and Peru, such as: El Diario Vasco, Estella Noticias, Caretas Perú, Cover Magazine Perú, among others. He lives and works between La Rioja, Navarra and Béarn.