From Latin America to San Francisco
Show dates: 03•08•08 through 04•05•08
From Latin America to San Francisco
Gerardo Caro, Jorge Jurado, Venuz White
Anibal Catalan, Claudio Roncoli and Silvia Poloto
Despite a limited representation of Latin American art in the US, its market is experiencing a solid growth. Collectors and museums have recognized that these artists, have worked to their advantage outside the trends of the western cultures. With globalization as a road map, Latin American artists have so much to contribute from their displaced perspective. LIMN is pleased to present in collaboration with Gallery 415 the work of six promising Latin American artists.
Jorge Jurado who works and lives in Cartagena, Colombia chooses to mix iconographies. Using three different “graphic” skills such as outline, negative space and realism, images are floating in space. His paintings of figures or motifs from famous paintings are combined with abstract fragments of comic book images, and random objects, then transformed into windows onto the ‘lives’ of things that we might encounter in daily life, such as a vase, speedboat or giraffe, and here surprisingly with a completely realistic rendering. The pictorial work of Venuz White has an eloquently contemporary quality in its conceptions and implications. The artist expresses herself with painting but her canvases lack references in the history of styles, and even thought her purposes can be qualified as abstract in the process she uses, her images remind us immediately of an inner world, a biological one. It
can be said, that her work splits in two complementary directions, one in which her investigations mainly concern the behavior of color in acrylic painting, and the other one in which imagination leads to a poetic approach of the unseen, the uncovering of a microscopic universe, invisible to the human eye, but at the same time vibrant and vital. White works and lives in Bogota, Colombia.
Anibal Catalan from Mexico City is trained as an architect but it is as a painter that the artist is able to pursue experimental architecture. Catalan characterizes his painting as an "endless labyrinth with multiple entrances and exits," each mark and material signifying something tangible in the real world. He uses words like falling roofs, walls, stairs, peaks, cables, floating canvases, vectors, hot and cold areas to explain the heterogeneous elements in his work. He creates visceral and cathartic spaces without falling into the metaphysical or the chaotic, with an impeccable awareness of defining each formal or material aspect of his compositions.
?Based in Colombia, Gerardo Caro is a mid-career artist, with a strong following in Latin America and Europe. Also trained as an architect, Caro puts significant emphasis and effort into expressing three dimensionality with layers upon layers of different textures forming abstract surfaces which he then combines with hyper realistic details. The first impression of his compositions is often an industrial feel, but that is deftly balanced with the richness in color and detail. Argentinean artist Claudio Roncoli presents satirical views of Utopia — be it Maoist propaganda or Western consumerism from the 50s. Someone is trying to convince us of something, and Roncoli’s social commentary on that ‘acquired’ happiness takes the form of computer rendered photo collages that are then painted. The works combine both digital media, photography and painting but he also does interventions on objects, typically icons of consumer goods, turning everyday objects into stories. Silvia Poloto, from San Paulo, Brazil relocated to San Francisco in the early nineties leaving behind a career as an engineer. Her abstract paintings are a purely visual endeavor – they have everything to do with the process, which inevitably express her self and aspirations. This process, which she approaches intuitively, seems to open her imagination. It’s dynamic, without a predetermined idea – the paintings develop and evolve as she works on them, letting them find what they want to be.
Special Thanks to Christina Bosemark from
Gallery 415, San Francisco.
From Latin America to San Francisco
Gerardo Caro, Jorge Jurado, Venuz White
Anibal Catalan, Claudio Roncoli and Silvia Poloto
Despite a limited representation of Latin American art in the US, its market is experiencing a solid growth. Collectors and museums have recognized that these artists, have worked to their advantage outside the trends of the western cultures. With globalization as a road map, Latin American artists have so much to contribute from their displaced perspective. LIMN is pleased to present in collaboration with Gallery 415 the work of six promising Latin American artists.
Jorge Jurado who works and lives in Cartagena, Colombia chooses to mix iconographies. Using three different “graphic” skills such as outline, negative space and realism, images are floating in space. His paintings of figures or motifs from famous paintings are combined with abstract fragments of comic book images, and random objects, then transformed into windows onto the ‘lives’ of things that we might encounter in daily life, such as a vase, speedboat or giraffe, and here surprisingly with a completely realistic rendering. The pictorial work of Venuz White has an eloquently contemporary quality in its conceptions and implications. The artist expresses herself with painting but her canvases lack references in the history of styles, and even thought her purposes can be qualified as abstract in the process she uses, her images remind us immediately of an inner world, a biological one. It
can be said, that her work splits in two complementary directions, one in which her investigations mainly concern the behavior of color in acrylic painting, and the other one in which imagination leads to a poetic approach of the unseen, the uncovering of a microscopic universe, invisible to the human eye, but at the same time vibrant and vital. White works and lives in Bogota, Colombia.
Anibal Catalan from Mexico City is trained as an architect but it is as a painter that the artist is able to pursue experimental architecture. Catalan characterizes his painting as an "endless labyrinth with multiple entrances and exits," each mark and material signifying something tangible in the real world. He uses words like falling roofs, walls, stairs, peaks, cables, floating canvases, vectors, hot and cold areas to explain the heterogeneous elements in his work. He creates visceral and cathartic spaces without falling into the metaphysical or the chaotic, with an impeccable awareness of defining each formal or material aspect of his compositions.
?Based in Colombia, Gerardo Caro is a mid-career artist, with a strong following in Latin America and Europe. Also trained as an architect, Caro puts significant emphasis and effort into expressing three dimensionality with layers upon layers of different textures forming abstract surfaces which he then combines with hyper realistic details. The first impression of his compositions is often an industrial feel, but that is deftly balanced with the richness in color and detail. Argentinean artist Claudio Roncoli presents satirical views of Utopia — be it Maoist propaganda or Western consumerism from the 50s. Someone is trying to convince us of something, and Roncoli’s social commentary on that ‘acquired’ happiness takes the form of computer rendered photo collages that are then painted. The works combine both digital media, photography and painting but he also does interventions on objects, typically icons of consumer goods, turning everyday objects into stories. Silvia Poloto, from San Paulo, Brazil relocated to San Francisco in the early nineties leaving behind a career as an engineer. Her abstract paintings are a purely visual endeavor – they have everything to do with the process, which inevitably express her self and aspirations. This process, which she approaches intuitively, seems to open her imagination. It’s dynamic, without a predetermined idea – the paintings develop and evolve as she works on them, letting them find what they want to be.
Special Thanks to Christina Bosemark from
Gallery 415, San Francisco.
