Juan Zurita: Tape, Texture, and the Art of Holding Back

I’ve been following Juan Zurita’s work for years, and I’ll tell you this: no one makes masking tape look this emotionally charged. Watching him work—painstakingly laying down strips of tape, painting over them, then peeling them off like he’s revealing a secret—is oddly hypnotic. It’s a method that shouldn’t feel dramatic, and yet somehow, in his hands, it’s quietly gripping. The end result? Paintings that look deceptively simple until you realize they’ve been engineered with a kind of obsessive elegance. Layers on layers on layers—like sediment.

Juan’s works have depth, tension, and a strange, magnetic pull. They’re structured without being rigid. Minimal but not minimalistic. Geometric, sure, but not the kind that bores you into a polite nod. These are paintings that suggest something larger is happening just under the surface. Something that required precision, patience, and probably a pretty solid playlist.

What gets me is how confidently these works hold back. They don’t overshare. They’re not trying to seduce you with color or spectacle. Instead, they unfold slowly—first you notice the lines, then the textures, then the way the paint seems to have been coaxed into place rather than brushed on. You see how one layer ghosts beneath another, how something sharp gets softened by something barely-there. It's not loud, but it lingers.

There’s always a sense of order flirting with collapse. That balance—the tension between construction and erosion—is where Juan’s genius sits. You can tell he’s edited the hell out of these pieces, but you never see the sweat. That’s the magic trick.

The color palette deserves its own paragraph. Juan works in hues that feel sun-faded, slightly bruised, and deeply intentional. There’s nothing random here. You’ll see dull ochres next to muted blues that almost—but not quite—clash with a bruised plum or the occasional acidic pop of something that refuses to behave. It's the kind of palette that makes you realize how loud most other abstract painters are.

What I also love is how unbothered his work is by trends. These are slow burns. The more time you spend with one of his pieces, the more you start to pick up the rhythm—the way a certain gridline lines up almost perfectly with another one across the canvas, or how a scraped section reveals a previous layer like a forgotten conversation. They’re not “finished” in the traditional sense. They’re resolved in a way that feels more honest.

So yeah, I’m a fan. A long-time one. And I’ll keep watching those studio videos like they’re suspense thrillers, tape being laid and lifted with surgeon-level focus. It’s not just a process—it’s a philosophy. Build it up. Take it away. Let the residue speak.