Terrada Art Complex

Terrada Art Complex
Shinagawa, Tokyo

 

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Celes Orozco’s art continues

I first encountered Celes Orozco’s paintings at a 2019 exhibition (reviewed here). His style has evolved in some new directions since then, so it’s time to document some of the stages he has moved through. The boundaries in these stages of development are fluid, but I’ve organized them, perhaps somewhat randomly, into groups that make sense to me (an interested party with no formal training in art). Make what you will of them, reorganize them into different groups as suits your own fancy, or just enjoy. And note that I use “evolution” loosely, as there is nothing immature about the earlier 2019 works; it’s just that every time I see his work, it seems to have moved in some new and interesting direction.

From the 2019 exhibition

1. Some of the paintings at this exhibition struck me as “cosmic abstracts.”

     

                 Untitled 1                                                                 Untitled 2

2. Some struck me as Orozco’s own expression of surrealism. For this style, I’ll give one full painting with a detail from that painting.

                                                    El niño y la serpiente

Detail from El niño y la serpiente

3. Some paintings from the 2019 exhibition struck me as a third style – with some overlap with the surrealism to be sure, but fundamentally different in effect. These I’ll call “primal landscapes” (or “archetypal landscapes” if you prefer).

Caos

                                                             El desierto

Soñando

Post-2019

Since the exhibition, I’ve noticed some new stylistic departures for Orozco, at least in my own aesthetic register.

4. One thing I noticed is that some of the more recent paintings call attention to the hand of the artist, the way the artists is applying the paint to create the world. I’ll call this the “stroke and mosaic” group, insofar as what captivates is the manner of brush (or hand) stroke or the mosaic effect.

 

5. The “stroke and mosaic” group might also be called the “particle/wave” group, insofar as the images come at you in particles (above right) or waves (above left). A related variation, but again one that I find fundamentally different in effect, I’ll call the “marbling and glaze” group. Here, some representational forms are still depicted or suggested, but the marbling and glaze of the style is what seems to define the world view and viewer response.

So again, please play with or revise my groupings in whatever way best brings to corpus to life for you. I reserve the right to revise them myself, based on whatever interesting byways come up in Orozco’s continuing body of work.

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Cati in Mexico City

Here’s a photo of talented artist Catalina Gris’s exhibit last month in Mexico City. I’ve blogged about her here and here. Otherwise, I will let the photo speak for itself.

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Art, knowledge, and thinking like a mushroom

Venue:          Yes We Cannibal Art Space, 1600 Government St, Baton Rouge, LA
Exhibition:    Eat the Anthropocene by Cesar and Lois, mycelia and friend entities
June 5 – July 11, 2021

In their Eat the Anthropocene art works, Cesar and Lois put together a very special kind of palimpsest. Special structurally, because, unlike the common palimpsest, the layers are not superimposed but are integrated and organic. They grow out of each other. Special in terms of content because these are not two layers of conventional art, but layers composed of books and mushrooms, respectively – book knowledge and organic knowledge, with the mushrooms reclaiming the territory of the book for their own organic purposes.

Where is the lasting knowledge? In the fungus or in the book?

   

And what remembrance have we, what new engagement, when all is said and done?

  

Here’s a 4-minute video Cesar and Lois made to tune the imagination to the images in the gallery space.

Pick up the perqs of micropatronage (1, 10, 20, 50, 100 levels) for Yes We Cannibal as they build an open home for experiments in art, music, food, and performance. Set in an inner city Baton Rouge neighborhood, the art space is up and running, and Mat and Liz are in the planning stages of a free neighborhood food forest with flowers, fruits, vegetables and herbs. Give them a little support!

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Archetypes in Space

Exhibition: Anima Vestra
Artist: Ann London-Zvejnieks
St. Tammany Art Assoc. Art House
Covington, Louisiana, USA
February 13 – March 27, 2021

Below are a few images from a fantastic exhibition of works by London-Zvejnieks. The images struck me as powerful archetypes. The charcoal medium, sans color, really allows a focus on character and on the lines and strokes. Most engaging about the lines and strokes, I thought, is how they place the figures in space. Also, to me they gave the effect of ancient (and periodically revived) rubbing art. To be honest, someone advised against that comparison because it might sound like I was suggesting cheap duplicates of something else. It is true that rubbing art suggests an image taken from something else – e.g., from an original relief image of brass or wood or stone – but I don’t mean to say the works here seem copied from other originals but rather that London-Zvejnieks uses this effect to create a kind of internal palimpsest that adds power to the archetypes. What are archetypes after all? Images in the collective unconscious (or at the “primitive roots of consciousness” as Carl Jung says), buried under layers and layers of history on the cultural level and buried under layers and layers of conscious memories on the personal level. Buried, primeval, perhaps forgotten on the conscious level, but still exerting an enormous influence on the way we think and feel and see the world. In that sense, I think the presentation of the images as something emerging from behind the surface of these larger charcoal strokes — or, with the larger exhibition in mind, emerging from the primeval African landscapes and fauna that London-Zvejnieks draws from — is perfect.

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Art at Lechón Illustrado

I was at Lechón Illustrado recently looking at Samara Colina’s paintings with friend and artist, Catalina Gris. What I found most interesting was how the paintings worked on two levels. Up close, you could get lost in a fantastic abstract array of color patches.

Then, as you slowly move away, the image becomes more and more representational.

When the whole scene finally comes into focus, the sheer number of human figures represented is dizzying.

“Maybe,” I said to Cati, “maybe that’s what Kant meant by the mathematical sublime.” (Sidebar: I have more than once bantered my German friends that it takes a German like Kant to see mathematics as a sublime experience.) Anyway, Kant was talking about magnitude, but here it is literally a numeric overload; as you step back from the detail, the multitude is too great to fathom or even to be contained in the frame of the canvas. Even the spatula smears diagonally across the upper left and right warp the time-space curve into something larger than what the senses can grasp.

“No,” Cati said. “This isn’t it – the Kantian sublime.” Not that she didn’t like the painting, she just thought I was forcing in the theory. She was probably right. I always try a bit too hard to wrap my head around the mathematical sublime. (Kant’s power-based dynamical sublime is easier to grasp for me.)

“Maybe if the entire wall was covered,” Cati said.

“Yes,” I said, “That’s it.”

Whether representative of Kant’s mathematical sublime or not, it is a signature feature of Colina’s work (cp. the painting below, also at Lechón Illustrado).

(Click images below for links)