Alvaro De Jesus

“Art and science are the highest triumphs of the human spirit.”

Alvaro De Jesus.

Alvaro De Jesus was born in Caracas in 1983. He studied engineering in Caracas and Bordeaux, obtained a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and later a master's degree from IESA. As an engineering student he was particularly interested in theoretical physics and mathematics, and in France he furthered his knowledge of production techniques at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers.

He began his artistic career by investigating the relationship between art and science, his two passions, and found a largely overlooked subject that became the center of his work. Since 2013 he has researched it in depth, drawing attention to morality and to how art and science work together in shaping our ethics. He works at the LFA studio in Miami; he draws on kinetic art and reinterprets movement as a metaphor for the relationship between art and science.

Science and art go hand in hand in shaping the way we think about the Universe and our place in it. Science systematically explores the world around us and discovers the hidden truths of the Universe; art systematically challenges the status quo and makes us reflect on the deeper meaning that scientific discoveries entail.

Morality is one area deeply influenced by both. Our views on morality are shaped by our growing understanding of nature, advanced by science, and by the debate on how we relate to that new information, fostered by art. Through my work I defend the thesis that art and science work together to propose moral values to society.

Neither science nor art is a belief system, yet both share the values that make them work: respect for truth, disregard for authority, intellectual honesty, elegance and beauty, the search for reality, skepticism, free enquiry and experimentation.

Kinetic art is key to my goal. The observer of the piece becomes, in a sense, a scientist: watching the optical illusion, skeptical about what is perceived and curious about how it works, they look at the piece from different angles and set up experiments to find the truth behind the illusion, going beyond aesthetic beauty to discover the conceptual beauty behind it.