Amie Cunat
My paintings and installations investigate parallels between abstraction and perception. What I mean by perception is the recognition of certain behaviors in objects/events that can formally manifest within abstraction. Embedded in my work are choices that expose, obscure, confine, and mediate the original source. In Clue, Cue, I had the chance to make an installation in the gallery’s windows. While I lived on Orchard Street between 2012-2015, these windows displayed shirts and shoes when it was a men’s clothing store. When conceiving of the installation, I wanted to reassert the functionality of a storefront window taking advantage of all three viewable sides. The resulting wall painting and objects were combined to construct a “reimagined” storefront window, where each side of the entryway installation shared similar zig-zag forms, but differed in their display.
The ways in which I choose subjects for my work varies, but what they all have in common is in their absurdity. When I look for observable events or moments, I have tendency to be drawn to the strangeness of something occurring. This may reflect a certain sense of humor that I wish to express in the works, but it's also because I desire to make evident the importance of the minute through abstract means. Relative to the way I find sources for my abstract paintings, when looking at my work, it is necessary to “stumble upon” and to see what’s “sticking-out”. I want viewers to discover formal and phenomenological idiosyncrasies and at the same time, to give into an experience of finding.
My process involves observing real objects/events then drawing them in my sketchbook. What began as an observation becomes a painterly image or object that is “of” the original experience. Color choice is a negotiation between its formal function as well as its buoyant and comedic tenor. It is important for me to maintain a sense of sarcasm or slang between color/composition within my work. It is within slang that I feel vocabulary reveals “cultural” specificity. The works’ visual experience is playful, but sparse in painterly mark-making. This is because I am interested in developing hand through drawing/cutting (contours developed from adjacent hues). I place significant importance on the interaction between fields of color; therefore, when you see these pieces, there is a simultaneous and holistic affect. In other words, I want figure and ground to achieve equal presence in a given surface.
Óscar Valero Sáez
GRAPHIC TRANSPOSITION OF MUSICAL STRUCTURE
I propose to explore alphabets and musical compositions through a visual process.
I analyze them in a graphical way, introducing into the physical world.
Musical and Alphabets constructions are translated into the visual medium where the structure is revealed and occupies a space. My research aims to visualize the process from conception to realization of the structure.
My Current artistic practice explores the musical composition of JS Bach’s “Well tempered clavier” (1722) through a graphical process. I am interested in applying the classical conception of beauty to music —that beauty originates from structure—.
“Well Tempered Clavier” is a collection of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. Based on structural rules, the collection can be seen as a tutorial in compositional theory. W.T.C. is a set of short compositions designed to show why specific combinations of notes are harmonic, while others make noise.
The investigation is based on different graphical and spatial variations of the same theme “The24 Preludes”. They are preparatory pieces for the fugues—to warm up the hands—sketches with a transitory character
The classical conception of beauty is as an arrangement of integral parts into a coherent whole, according to proportion, harmony. The Preludes also have this character. Taking a musical pattern, they play with it moving through the score and deforming it spatiality.
The research began with a focus on John Cage’s musical compositions and continues now with Bach. The link between Cage and Bach is that both approached composition in a structural way. They worked out their concepts, applied a structure, and then performed their compositions to find out how they sound. I understand my artistic work in a similar way—not as product or object but as an extended investigation in which the result is the process itself and the objects created are the consequences.
I would like to reveal the beauty of the Preludes through a graphical representation, and explore written music as an open structure where the Score is not approached as musical notation. but as form. Two dimensions of the music presented in the score are coded into a grid: pitch and time.
My work is arranged in series; Working drawings and other visible things:
Black ink on millimeter paper
White ink on black paper
Monochrome two and three dimension pieces using fragile mediums: paper, threads, ceramic.
Preparatory works for conceptualizing 3-dimensional installation
Exposing musical structure through a visual medium, makes conscious the space that music occupies. The Preludes are shown in a global way. They are suspended in time.
Rafael Corzo
http://www.rafaelcorzo.com/
Clay is earth, earth is nature, and nature in my hands is art. Art is energy, an inherent force in my blood, the strength of my culture, relentlessly working with the desire to express, give, and share the adventure of creation. In consciousness and materiality where all possibilities already exist, clay is visceral audacity, innocent and savage in conception and evolution. There in every moment where you are, there will always be a place for continuity. Ceramics is a rational structure in a naughty skin. In an act of love, the grotesque is a sensibility anew, a synergy between the tumultuous and the well-behaved. Opened areas allow you to enter the intimate space where process and theory are captured and give birth to eclectic forms escaping gravity, expressing motion. Ceramics is aspiration and wild euphoria where harmony and rhythm can never have enough embellishments. And I am, seduced by density in ecstasy - a constellation of colors in a unifying palette celebrating life. In a constant state of creation and in a virtuous cycle, I dream of universality transcending ages. These are the genuine feelings and expansive energy vibrating inside the artist, a true essence. It is the frenzied pursuit of a vision, estoy aquí con fuerza. It is not a fantasy, I give myself with devotion looking for all beauty: compressed, unreal, ideal, ethereal. With this premise in the heart, and clarity in my mind, art will always be. Like birds looking for the stars on a journey so far the distance, I keep hope for and faith in a bright tomorrow: so in love with art, so in love with life, creating destiny.