Matias Arganaraz Exhibition

James Fuentes LLC

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Incorporating oils, acrylic, charcoal, and collage, Matias Arganaraz’s mixed media paintings draw on a wealth of visual references ranging from mass marketing cartoon characters and street art to Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism. In his larger canvases, Arganaraz melds moments of pure abstraction with dense fields of figuration, joining the history of painting with that of popular culture (a distinction that has, of course, been blurry since the 1980s).

Arganaraz mines all levels of visual culture for inspiration, collecting images and notes that he then incorporates into his work. These notes appear verbatim in Note Painting, which features collaged drawings from the artist’s collected ideas. However, Arganaraz’s visual archive appears elsewhere in less explicit terms. In Coco “Meshprize” Lopez, for instance, the cartoon character Coco Lopez, who appears on cans of the eponymous coconut milk typically used in piña coladas, appears four times, each in a slightly different iteration. In addition to such macro advertising, the artist also draws on his own biography in works such as Pablo Sr.’s Argentina Phone Number, which refers to his grandfather. Taken together, these diverse visual and textual citations create a web of our contemporary visual world.

Matias Arganaraz (b. 1987) lives and works in New York City. His most recent solo show was held at Magic Gallery, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions include “Logic Frog,” Allen & Eldridge, New York (2016); “Strangers Forming a Group Waiting to Kiss,” Motel Gallery, Brooklyn (2015), “Second Show,” Eddysroom, Brooklyn (2015).