A Place for Us

A PLACE FOR US

When I was growing up, the presence of figurative art and sculpture was always present. That was the dominant language of art all over Latin America and Spain with the exception of a few artists like Tapiez and Millares who did the crossover to abstraction. Mexican artists such as Tamayo and Siqueiros gained force during the 1960’s as well as many other figurative painters from Latin America. My visits to El Museo del Prado, The Tamayo Museum, The Van Gogh Museum, The Rembrandt Museum, Old Masters Museum and more institutions that surrounded my youth exposed me to figuration and the languages of the masters. Most art galleries showed figurative art and made it difficult to escape to a language of abstraction and minimalism.

In the 1970’s when I went to New York to study, I started getting familiar with abstraction and the great development of the use of freehand languages. Conversations with Sydney Janis and artist Gene Davis opened my eyes to a new language of expression. It took me around 10 years to be comfortable using a very personal palette and leaving figuration to enter into an expression of lyric abstraction. I made paintings in series; KYBALION (1985-87) and SYMBOLS OF GROWTH (1987-1989) where the result of the personal development of an idiom which can be read as an abstract painting. I felt obliged to add expressions with the use of calligraphy because my interest in the written languages occupied my mind and I was influenced by the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Julio Cortazar. The narrative of the written language dominated my use of color, and how I told the story. This ignited my interest in developing transparencies from an organic material and became a force of creativity.

My paintings for many years have been the product of my reaction to “secret dialogues”. In 1991, I devoted an entire series to this theme. These have been conversations I’ve had throughout the years with fellow artists, historians, businessmen, doctors in medicine, architects, art dealers and the people on the street that I listen to. Also included are dialogs with masters from the past. Among the artists and people that influenced me are some very dear to me, like my visit with Peter Boris in November 2014 to talk and see the works of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, which ignited questions in my creative mind and assisted me in moving forward in the production of a new body of work. Also, my friendship with Skarlet Smetana gave me a perspective on how the impulse of creativity can move the viewer.

In two thousand twelve, I was working in a series of paintings based on the concept of “Vital Forces”; the inner energies that can go from the mind to the hand and finally become a painting. And parallel to that, I was working as the director of one of the most prominent art collections in Europe. This gave me the opportunity to visit important art dealers and be in touch with some of the art and artists that provoked me to changes and to create the series “A Place for Us”.