Jonatan Bando, also known as JACLOT, is a Vancouver-based visual artist.
Born in Argentina and raised in Japan, he later moved to Canada. After spending many years in Whistler, he began developing his ongoing Whistler 36 Views series, exploring the relationship between landscape, memory, and personal experience.
Now based in Vancouver, Jonatan continues to create works inspired by both urban and natural environments across British Columbia. His paintings combine the transparency and unpredictability of watercolor with influences from Japanese aesthetics, visual storytelling, and his own multicultural background.

Rather than simply documenting a place, his work seeks to capture the emotions, memories, and atmosphere that remain with us after we leave it.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work begins with a place, but the landscape itself is rarely the final subject.
I am interested in the emotions we attach to places. Anticipation, uncertainty, memory, loneliness, hope, and how a landscape can sometimes reflect an inner state more clearly than words can.

I often divide a painting into multiple scenes or perspectives to explore different moments, emotions, or ways of seeing the same experience. Watercolor is especially important to me because of its unpredictability and irreversibility. Once pigment and water touch the paper, every decision leaves a trace.

One of the central ideas in my practice is connection: between a place and a memory, between my experience and the viewer’s, and between people who may never meet but recognize something familiar in the same image.

I do not want to simply show what a place looked like. I want to preserve something of what it felt like to be there.