The graphic production on paper that will make up the main body of Dystopia is not for Cuellar an instance prior to his pictorial work. It does not fulfil any type of study function for its tables, nor of sketch, nor of mere exercise. The drawing is for Juan Cuéllar rather a point of arrival in the search process of a material apt to register the scenes of a past as possible as unreal, as defined as spared, as tangible as evanescent.

 

Because Dystopia is, with all propriety, a collection of invented memories that persist in the collective imagination as snapshots of modernity that he has never culminated. Cuéllar has submerged himself in the contradictory sense of a utopia considered as a future that will never take place in the way it was designed and that, when it has been closer to being realized, has functioned defectively, incompletely and untidily to the limits of sinister. On these hypercalculated compositions, the enlightening vision is continuously denied and any evolution thought from the concept of historical time is stopped, without escape from the period of classical modernity of the twentieth century, time frozen and delimited by a lack of meaning and by contradictions that will never be resolved.

 

Dystopia also becomes a disescopy, incomplete vision. Targets of visual information discreetly invade scenes populated by standardized habits in the domestic sphere or in public spaces, of induced dreams, of naturalized family objects and of a reified nature. Dystopia testifies the failure of the panoptical ideal of obtaining total evidence through the obsessive watchful attitude that aspired to effectively inspect the world. The descriptive virtuosity of Juan Cuéllar and his feature characteristic style, consisting of omitting essential elements to complete the information, nourish the powerful concept that sustains Dystopia: the final and irrevocable defeat of the optical representation of reality as a source of certainty against the eternal postmodern psychic loop of desire and the disappointment.