Paintings
Painting is the core of my practice, based on a conceptual system, not a fixed style. The emphasis is on transformation, experimenting with fragmentation, format and changing installations, prioritizing quality of form and technique, mostly oil on panel. The natural world represented in symbolic and metaphoric associations is my ongoing subject.
The Elements (2024)
The 2024 polyptychs, Fire, Earth, Water, Air precisely constructed oil on wood panels, assembled and bolted to wood frames and strips, continue previous formal explorations and recall the architectural Prouns of El Lissisky. Frame-like wood strips, extend the paintings into space and create linear shadows on the wall. These constructions combine detailed painted representations of burning trees, planting fields, the flow of water and the curves of air, with geometric figures that identify each element by its corresponding alchemic symbol. The making of these works was a sculptural and formal balancing act.
Cosmos (2020-2024)
My paintings suggest movements and patterns in nature: from the microscopic, the visible, the man-made to the cosmic scale, in a new synthesis of opposites, the geometric and the lyrical.
The Cosmos paintings 2020-24, represent a reaction against the extreme visual and verbal turbulence in our world. My goal in these works is to convey in the viewer a sense of introspection, contemplation and fascination, going back to the idea of the peaceful sublime.
The technique of oil on panel, white grounds with transparent glazes in layers without much texture has been a constant in my approach to painting. I want the works to reflect light from within. In some works, the paint is made with natural pigments and resins. Many of the ½ wood panels have a frame behind and float away from the wall and creating a shadow.
Constellations (2016-2018)
| Constellations draws our attention toward the celestial. The geometric and the gestural combine in this series of paintings to elegantly represent the cosmic dance.
For the artist, this is often expressed as the interplay between two diametrically opposed energies: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Dionysus is the divine chaos that sparks and inspires, while Apollo is the supernatural order that organizes, bringing disparate parts into a working relationship with one another. An artist’s work is their mirror. What we experience and perceive in their work is, in fact, the artist themselves. If that artist has arrived through personal alchemy at a level of perception that transcends our own, then we are permitted to glide on the wings of the work toward a vista that surpasses our previously held horizon. Constellations is an invitation to soar. Chris Davies, Elevated Matter Gallery |
Notes From The River (2022-2024)
The re-interpretation of landscape has been an ongoing subject since my early works. In multiple occasions, series of works are triggered by a place lived or discovered. While living in the Hudson Valley, the river has become a protagonist since 2022.
Earth, Air and Water are present in the Notes from the River. The paintings explore Hudson River’s evening views with dark foregrounds and luminous skies. Geometric shapes, lines and numbers indicating the coordinates of Hudson, NY, serve to contrast the idyllic representations of mountains, sky and water.
The intention is to create an awareness of the various perceptual and symbolic conditions that affect our experience of nature and its representation in painting.
Still Lifes and Assemblages
Still Lifes (2020-2024)
| During the pandemic and through 2021, I worked in isolation in increasingly small rooms of limited wall space in Hudson NY. I felt an urge to express a detailed intimacy in my paintings.What resulted are technically elaborate still life paintings on wood panel of objects, fruits, vegetables that incorporated abstract shapes quoting details of Malevich, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaney, Lolo Soldevilla, Hilma af Klimt and often the actual painted object.
By juxtaposing the realism of fruits and actual objects to abstract shapes, I vivify the inanimate, pointing to the interior life of a painting. These works have extended my current range of expression, integrating dissimilar genres to create a magical world. The paintings continue the explorations started in the paintings of 1983 to 1993. |
Escenarios (2023)
Assemblages and paintings in boxes have been a recurrent strategy in my work since the 90s. Escenario (stage set) is a poem in 7 cigar boxes, polyptych. Assemblage and texts. The text written inside each box, in the sequence 1 to 7 becomes a narrative suggesting the intention of this piece:
Escenario:
In the woods I found the spheres
And fragments of words
Night gardens at Lake George
And daily encounters with shells
Forbidden notes and scripts
In hidden islands where I was born
