calendario eventi  :: 

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6/10/2008

Two exhibitions

Lehman College Art Gallery, New York

Tony Bechara: Grand Canyon

Introduction
Tony Bechara's paintings are dynamic fields set into motion by the interaction of color. For more than thirty years Bechara has explored the optics of light and the perception of color through geometric abstraction that is formalist and conceptual. Over that time his work has evolved within the structured format of a grid, using a system that while analytic and precise, incorporates chance.

Exploring a dialectic of determined forms and random possibilities, Bechara's process is partially blind and full of dichotomies and seeming contradictions. The work is at once prescribed and intuitive, rigorous and whimsical. There is a restrained order, yet it is open to excess. And while Bechara's method is based on a rigid geometry, the effect is often organic in terms of the shapes and patterns that arise as aggregated colors fuse.

Bechara's process begins with the grid. Using masking tape strips, he creates a surface of small 1/4" squares of paint reminiscent of the tessera of a mosaic or the pixels of a digital image. Colors are added stroke by stroke, row by row. In the works in this exhibition, his palette is limited to thirty-six to forty primary and secondary colors or achromatic blacks, whites and grays. The tapes are moved four times for each axis, and in the process, cover some of the existing hues. This part of the procedure opens the system to fortuitous accidents, turning a controlled procedure into one with chance juxtapositions of color. The saturated acrylic colors catch and reflect the light. They shift and intensify in relation to adjacent colors, form after-images, and the surface comes to life, flickering and pulsating with an illusion of motion. It is a kinetic effect that takes place in the eye and the mind.

Bechara began working with systems and grids in the mid 70s, in part in reaction to the emotionalism and lack of restraint in the art of the period and the cultural times in general. He began showing his work during the rise of the Pattern and Decoration movement, a group of artists known for confronting the Modernist bias against decoration, as well as their re-invigoration of the minimalist grid and cross-cultural borrowings. Both Bechara and artists connected to the P&D movement found inspiration in Byzantine and Islamic sources -- particularly in the patterns of the mosaics, tiles, and rugs -- and Bechara exhibited in some of the P&D exhibitions in Europe.

The influences that have shaped Bechara's work are broad and sometimes unexpected. He draws on artists whose work has a direct relationship as well as those who are less obvious sources. The Pointillists and Impressionists, whose attempts to capture the experience of light revolutionized painting, are important precursors, as are the optical experiments of Bridget Riley and Joseph Albers, and the Latin American kinetic artists Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. But Bechara also notes the structure of Giotto's colors and Paul Klee's compositions as influences and sees the morphology of Johann Sebastian Bach's musical compositions as an analogous form.

The large-scale triptych Grand Canyon, lends its title to the Lehman exhibition. Standing before it, one is taken by its sense of expansive space and the shifting undulations of light. Each panel is different, yet in each the tones darken along the vertical borders of the canvas creating segments within the patterning, which in this series is an overall effect. It is a contemplative panorama in a range of almost black to almost white through myriad grays. Bechara's titles are evocative and metaphorical rather than literal, intended to amplify the experience after the initial visual/retinal effect. In this case the title recalls the memory of the light and air of the Grand Canyon, its vast scale and landscape. It is less about narrative than a visceral reaction to a time and place and a translation of the experience of light.

This exhibition also includes Geometry and Color, an installation of shaped canvases -- circle, square, diamond, and triangle -- in which the overall surface patterns spill over the edge of the canvas stretchers. These small, 36"x36", canvases investigate the distortions of surface over a dimensional, geometric shape and offer color fusions in jewel-like hues.

We are pleased to have the opportunity to present this exhibition and to have this window onto the process and career of Tony Bechara. An online catalogue will be available at www.lehman.edu /gallery. Tony Bechara: Grand Canyon has been made possible with support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and JPMorgan Chase Foundation.

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Where does the work start and where does it end? Is there a beginning or a finishing point? An intermittent flow of blue lines and volumes takes over the white spaces of the canvases. Little by little they engulf their surroundings to create an architectural environment. Cut and continuity, flow and interruption, partial dwellings and total nests, restful and activated spaces made out of lines that continually advance and intrude from canvas to canvas. Elizabeth Jobim’s work is in a state of process, in a permanent flux, always unfolding into new forms, either connecting one panel to the next or suddenly breaking them apart.

Jobim’s point of departure is irregular stones that she finds in the streets of her native city, Rio de Janeiro. Based on the appearance and shapes of the stones, she then creates small volumetric drawings. Upon close observation of these sketches, one begins to understand how the large-scale canvases take their form. Her lines blend from one panel into the next in a row of square and rectangular surfaces that cover the walls of the galleries, both in Rio de Janeiro and in New York. The work is in continual renewal generating different patterns and configurations. In Jobim’s painting-installation, the order of the canvases can be shuffled to allow different narratives. The work is made of parts that connect to other parts to create the whole. A straight line can transform itself into a volumetric shape or return to its linear primal state.

Jobim’s lines are confident and uncertain at the same time. They can be straight and contorted, firm and staggering, thick and thin, flat and volumetric. This is as though they are overcoming obstacles in trying to find their way into the space. They seem to be based on geometric abstraction. Nevertheless, they are deeply rooted in figuration.

Coming out of the solid Latin American tradition of geometric abstraction, Jobim subverts the way in which line and volume have been used by artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s--as a logical, rational, mathematical and quasi-scientific way to convey a utopian longing for technology and industrialization. Different from the works generated by the Concrete artists from Brazil, where geometric abstraction was predominantly a conceptual game of forms organized in space, Jobim’s shapes are in reality still-life-based. Her canvases are a play of stripping and veiling between abstraction and figuration.

Jobim’s work alludes to the large-scale cut-outs by Henri Matisse, especially his architectural installation piece Swimming Pool (summer 1952), with its expansive simplified design, as well as semi-abstract and compelling figuration, in blue freehand cutouts. Through the useof ultramarine blue oil paint--applied with rollers, like the work of a wall painter—Jobim’s canvases are unevenly painted, creating spots and stains that activate the whiteness of the background through the luminosity and transparency of the blue.

Her work invokes Yves Klein’s monochromatic canvases made of his trademark and patented blue (International Klein Blue), and its connection to transcendence, immateriality, and spirituality. Jobim’s architectural installations are reminiscent of modern temples of meditation. The calmness of their inner space and the energy with which they suffuse the surrounding space are inseparable and interdependent.

Her encompassing use of the ultramarine blue fully impregnates the space, bringing to mind Hélio Oiticica’s use of color. As he wrote in the 1960s, Oiticica wanted to release color from its pictorial support, liberating it into the space. He created sensorial environments in which the viewer would no longer have a solely retinal experience, but could engage with color in a more corporeal way. Jobim also conflates a sense of color that escapes the limitations of the physical, and of the pictorial frame, immersing the viewer in its “blueness.” The moment we enter the space, we are caught inside the installation and immersed in its elegant flow of shapes and lines.

The daughter of Antonio Carlos Jobim—the father of Brazilian Bossa Nova—Elizabeth Jobim is influenced by music and its connections to time, intervals, and composition. Her work creates a play of continuity and disruption, like musical notes arranged on time. They stumble and stutter, lose and find themselves over and over again. In this endless game--with no specific beginning or clear end--, the lines keep on dancing and vibrating in blue at the pace of their own cadence.
Claudia Calirman, Curator

Image: Elizabeth Jobim

Opening Reception: Tuesday, October 7th, 6-7:30 pm

Lehman College Art Gallery
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Bronx - New York

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