NYAB Event - Roberto Mollá "Ricochet"

Roberto Mollá "Ricochet"

Kesting / Ray

This event has ended.

CHRISTINA RAY presents Ricochet, the gallery’s second solo exhibition for Valencia, Spain-based artist Roberto Mollá. A new series of paintings, marking the first major presentation in the US of the artist's works on canvas, will be exhibited alongside large-scale drawings on graph paper.

Mollá's vibrant and lyrical lines express his constant search for the perfect balance between organic and geometric forms. In a new body of work, Mollá pushes his dynamic structures to the extreme in abstract, geometric compositions with a tightly limited color palette of grey and black. Of major influence for the artist in this series is early 20th century American graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, best known for his posters for the London Underground. Mollá's clusters of intersecting triangles, inspired by Kauffer, operate as abstract explosions or, as the artist describes them, "vorticist blasts."

Mollá deftly remixes historical iconography in his work to create a style uniquely his own. Sharp, futuristic lines cut straight through playfully narrative shapes and forms reminiscent of classic cartoon characters, taking on curves as they warp the picture plane. In an article for Whitewall Magazine, writer Lily Alexander illuminated this concept of warping in the artist's work: “Time is flexible in Mollá’s work, and different time periods and styles exist simultaneously. We enter the graph as a multi-dimensional world – which allows our minds to grasp what time might look like if it is layered rather than linear, or how space might appear if dimensions existed one upon the other.”

Mollá's stylistic endeavor creates a polarizing effect - an almost magnetic push-pull sensibility. As artist Shepard Fairey, a collector of Mollá's work, has written, “the tension between all these elements is fascinating. At a glance they are graphically powerful, but then they also have this meticulous subtlety which is just beautiful.”

For the artist, "Paradoxically the drawing process has been more playful because I worked on most of the drawings without a previous sketch, drawing lines automatically, lines that collide and ricochet off the paper's edge. The collection also includes six small acrylic paintings - this is also a change of medium from my usual oils and I see the work becoming more flat and matte. So the work as a whole is a kind of ricochet, or change of direction."