![]() Each painting evolves around a contour, a linear framework of curves and line segments that trace movements from points a to b, mapping the surface from end to end. Like Miralda, he is seeking to capture time and place (without resorting to story), but he approaches the problem directly through materials and process. Miralda transmits something more elusory than a story: a visual proxy for the sensory fact of experience-the fact of stubbing your toe, or of tripping while strolling mindlessly down the street.Ĭalvin Burton does not explicitly paint figures, though the 1:1 scale of body to painting is encoded in the dimensions of his forms and the tactility of his surfaces. As they contort the drawings stay perpetually tangential to narrative, offering us glimpses of the vibration that hovers beneath the activities of daily life. His work conjures a strong sense of place (specifically his native Mexico City) and of specific actions (tripping, falling, sleeping, dancing), but the viewer is denied a coherent string of events. Miralda germinates the possibility of narrative even as he remains wary of the temptation to “tell” a story. ![]() In the tradition of Latin American Modernism, exemplified by the work of José Clemente Orozco, Fermín Revueltas, Carlos Mérida, and Miguel Covarrubias, bodies and spaces are transfigured into rhythmic units laid out metrically like a time signature determines a song, or like tile size determines a mosaic. Jonathan Miralda’s drawings synthesize human bodies, architecture, and urban detritus with a fractal-like geometric vocabulary in which each component contains a grammatical blueprint for the whole. Following this scheme one could say, that if the if is causal to the when, then language (a set of preconceived givens) has the power to yield the unknown―the imaginative, the sensorial, and the speculative. In his 1971 book, Discours, figure, Jean-François Lyotard proposed that language (discourse) shapes our apprehension and articulation of an image, whereas figure is a concrete embodiment of that discourse (the elusive “here” to a discourse’s “there”). These parts of speech are the negative space between phrases, the hinge between adjacent actions. When and if are conjunctions, which function to stitch clauses of a sentence together: when preceding a certain or expected concept, and if preceding an uncertain conditional concept. This long-distance filling in of each other’s sentences oscillates from inside and outside of the works’ edges creating a rhythmic syncopation of complementary dualities. ![]() The two-person exhibition features paintings and works on paper arranged, paired, and offset throughout the gallery as surrogates for one another. is delighted to open When / if, a visual excerpt from an ongoing, transnational conversation between artists Calvin Burton (Brooklyn) and Jonathan Miralda Fuksman (Mexico City). ![]()
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