Pedro Hoz Spanish, b. 2000
Pedro Hoz is a visual artist whose practice investigates how images shape our understanding of reality. His artistic research began at the age of eighteen as an act of rebellion against inherited systems of thought and the cultural, religious and social paradigms that condition how we interpret the world. Since then, he has approached painting not as a means of representing reality, but as a tool for questioning it.
Belonging to a generation witnessing a renewed scientific, philosophical and cultural interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness, Hoz incorporates these experiences into a broader investigation of perception. His encounters with psychedelic substances do not appear in his work as a subject, but as a turning point that expanded his understanding of consciousness and reinforced a central question within his practice: to what extent is the reality we inhabit an objective truth, rather than a construction shaped by perception, culture and language? Painting thus becomes a laboratory in which he examines the relationship between perception, image, symbol and consciousness.
His work is based on the hypothesis that we do not inhabit reality as it is, but rather the reality that images, symbols and narratives have made possible to imagine. Through a visual language combining religious references, natural elements, everyday objects, impossible architectures and anthropomorphic figures, he creates a universe in which images lose their original function and acquire new possibilities of meaning.
Rather than constructing closed narratives, his compositions operate as territories where memory, myth, spirituality, intuition and direct experience can coexist without needing to be resolved. Each painting introduces or transforms symbols and establishes unexpected relationships between images from different cultural contexts, gradually forming a personal iconography.
Although his imagery maintains an ongoing dialogue with the European pictorial tradition, his aim is not to reinterpret the past, but to use it as a tool for thinking about the present. His works do not seek to provide answers, but to create spaces of uncertainty in which viewers can question the symbolic systems through which they interpret the world and consider whether what we call reality might also be the result of the images, narratives and beliefs we collectively share.
