Luis Roldán “Mechanical Ventilation: Interactions with Willys de Castro”
Henrique Faria Fine Art
This event has ended.
Henrique Faria Fine Art presents Mechanical Ventilation, Luis Roldán’s second gallery exhibition and his third in New York City. Opening May 9, the show will highlight the artist’s most recent pieces in conversation with emblematic 1950s works on paper by Brazilian artist Willys de Castro. As the latter stands as a central figure of neoconcretism, the former works by exploring and reanimating the modernist inquiry on abstraction and color in a contemporary context. Roldán necessarily shows how this synthetic reinvigoration of form creates an entirely different experience, which involves the viewer’s senses and infuses the gallery space with a new energy, but still exposes its art historical roots.
De Castro, involved with cinema, music, literature and theater from a young age, began to focus solely on the visual arts in 1957, but still allowed his previous interests to influence and shape his new direction of work. Looking at the planar nature of the canvas, he examined the constructive possibilities of color and shape. Cartaz-poema (1959) represents the pervading presence of poetry in the interactions and placement of words on paper, demonstrative of de Castro’s involvement with the newly formed Neoconcrete group in Rio de Janeiro. It also points to his sense of creative innovation as seen in his earlier, groundbreaking studies and designs for paintings, such as Estudos para pintura (1957-58) and Projecto para pintura 167 (1956), which broadened the frontiers of color fields and figural boundaries, and even the sense of two-dimensionality.
The freedom encountered in poetry is also felt in the work of Roldán, as he liberates his materials from their own physical confinement then endows them with personified characteristics, and as he relies on the spirit of chance to continually form and reform his pieces. Yet, it is the rigor of the machine that both ties Roldán to modernist paradigms and also provides a structure for, as curator Juan Ledezma writes, “the mediation of historical templates [through which] the artist re-instills sense into experience.” Cantos (2008), a constellation of strips of fabric, subjected to both emulsion and inking processes, are hung at random across the gallery wall and swing softly in the breeze created by the viewer’s approach and departure, maintaining an equilibrium with its environment. Numerales (2013) also strikes a balance between found objects and their ultimate placement within the work itself, between the readymade and the artist’s hand, between initial function and reincarnation.
It is this transformative hybridization, of not just objects, but also of artistic methodologies, space and time, that characterize the work of both Roldán and de Castro, binding them together. Mechanical Ventilation, too, is a hybridization of life itself, alluding to the possibility of the natural and highly individual act of breathing being enhanced by external means. Thus, seen side by side, the art of Roldán and de Castro are given the opportunity to interact, and thereby give one another new life.
Luis Roldán (Colombia - 1955) studied Art History at the École du Louvre (Paris), and Architecture at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). He has exhibited extensively in Colombia and the United States and was part of the Latin American Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale. He has won numerous awards such as the Luis Caballero Award (Bogotá) and the National Award in Visual Arts (Colombia). He lives and works both in New York City and Bogotá. His work is included in important collections such as Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank Collection, New York; FEMSA Collection, Monterrey; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and the Museums of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Medellín.
Willys de Castro (Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, 1926 - São Paulo, 1988). Painter, engraver, draughtsman, scenographer, costume designer and graphic artist. In 1950, he began an apprenticeship in graphic arts, executing his first abstract-geometric paintings and drawings. In 1958, he went to study in Europe, and in the following year back Brazil, joined the Grupo Neoconcreto [Neoconcretist Group] in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1959 and 1962, he worked on the Objetos Ativos [Active Objects] series, which explore plane and volume as plastic elements, questioning the use of the canvas as a support for pictorial language. His work is included in important collections such as Instituto da Arte Contemporanea, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Museo de Arte de São Paulo, Sao Paulo; The Museum of Modern Art and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York
[Image: Luis Roldán “La Pared” (2013) Powder paint on metal, collage on paper. 11 1/2 x 12 in. (29.2 x 30.5 cm.) each. 17 pieces]
Media
Schedule
from May 09, 2013 to June 15, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-09 from 18:00 to 21:00