Exhibition Location: TRIBECA, 72 Warren St, New York, NY 10007
Open to the public: September 10, 2019 10 AM – 7 PM
Press Preview: Wednesday, September 11th, 2019 at 11:30 AM
Private Cocktail: Friday, September 13th, 6-9 PM – By Invitation only 

“Oswaldo Vigas is one of the true innovators of Latin American art….He belongs among those who have contributed the most to keeping alive the natural cultural elements of his continent, which are as he himself has defined : “of pre-logic character, magic, mythological, non-rationalist” . ….Vigas has been able to make an original synthesis in his work, something personal between these preserved “natural tendencies” and the mores contemporary explorations of the creators of modernism….”.

Jean Clarence Lambert, French poet and art critic

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Born in Valencia, Venezuela in 1923, Oswaldo Vigas died in Caracas on April 22, 2014 at the age of 90. Hailed as a pioneer of Latin American art, like Lam, Matta and Tamayo, Vigas synthesized his Latin American roots with the most advanced pictorial currents of modernity. Similar to Philip Guston, Vigas experimented with both figurative and abstract painting in his quest to find his own voice. There have been over 100 solo exhibitions of Vigas’s paintings, sculpture, engravings, tapestries and ceramics. His work is included in the collections of many international public and private institutions.

“Oswaldo Vigas is one of the true inventors of Latin American art,” said poet and art critic Jean Clarence Lambert. “He contributed to keeping alive the natural cultural trends of South America, which are, as Vigas himself described, prelogical, magical, mythological and anti-rationalist.”

Influenced by pre-Hispanic art, pre-historic “Venus” figurines, African statues, the paintings of Velazquez and Goya and the work of the Abstract Expressionists and Neo Expressionist artists such and Jackson Pollock and George Baselitz, Vigas developed the iconic image of the “Bruja” (witch) that became a recurring theme in his work.

By the 1950s and 1960s, he was recognized as an important, emerging talent associated with the post- war resurgence of figuration. A move to Paris gave Vigas the opportunity to reflect about his identity and roots. During his Paris years, he started to paint abstractly and his personal, visual vocabulary started to incorporate constructivis and geometry.

He described his work “as a system of signs and symbols a personal way of conceiving objects, figures, color, lines and space.

Vigas went back to Venezuela in the late 1950s and then returned to Paris in the early 1960s. At this time, his approach to painting took a dramatic turn toward a gestural style associated first with abstract expressionism and then with lyrical abstraction. The new work focused on the driving force of emotions, matter and the mere act of painting. This “Informalism” or “Expressionism” was a response to formal geometric abstraction, which was popular at the time. Vigas’s paintings from this period, still influenced by pre-history and mythology, ooze with thick paint and evoke the art made by the CoBrA artists, distinguished by immediacy of thought without restrictions or pre-established reasoning.

In 1964, Vigas left Paris and returned to Venezuela where he lived for the rest of his life. The paintings from the beginning of this period show a marked ambivalence between the representational and the abstract. Recurring, neo-figurative elements start to appear in his new, cubist-like paintings. His signature black line narrows as he places geometrically alike figures in compressed spaces. He says about his work that his intention is now to reach, interpret and translate the dark signs and warnings that are the defining components of the South American condition.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Vigas continued to paint and began to experiment with sculpture, tapestries, engravings and ceramics. Just like his paintings, the new work was rooted in the reduction of the figure into abstract elements with references to both ancient civilizations and to the contemporary world.

In the 1990s, Vigas continued to develop his primitivist style with a focus on central figures from his personal mythology including demons, beasts, birds, women and witches. His paintings and sculptures from the 1990s meld both abstraction and figuration with the goal of liberating art from formal rigid structures.

At the end of his life, Vigas was overcome with an insatiable need to draw and to write poetry, an early passion. In his later years, he began a series of Crucifixion paintings inspired by drawings that he had done on newspapers and on concert programs. He exhibited until the very end of his life with solo exhibitions at Dillon Gallery in New York and at Ascaso Gallery in Miami.

THE ABOVE TEXT WAS OBTAINED FROM THE OSWALDO VIGAS FOUNDATION PRESS

About the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation
The Oswaldo Vigas Foundation was created in 2010 to preserve and promote the work of the artist. The Foundation’s mission is to collaborate on exhibitions and publications, to organize and maintain the Vigas archives, and to catalogue the artist’s work. The Foundation has organized “Oswaldo Vigas 1943 2013,” an exhibition that is traveling throughout South America making stops in Lima, Santiago, Bogotá, São Paulo and Mexico City. In 2016, The Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, directed by Lorenzo Vigas, the artist’s son, and the artist’s wife Janine, will publish a monograph about Vigas’s career.

 

Frangioni’s attitude to knotty ideas that can be difficult to conceptualize can be effectively summarized in a phrase: he casts complex ideas in efficaciously simple visual nutshell.

                               Christian Viveros-Fauné, Art Critic, Brooklyn 2021

 

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1 Brooklyn Bridge Park | June 1-28 | 2023

EXODUS IN NY is a solo exhibition by Alexandre Frangioni, a contemporary Brazilian artist. 

Curated by Carly Aguilera 

The Exodus series presents works exploring monetary values in their form of accumulation and transformation, revealing their paths traveled and the impacts they cause within society over time. Frangioni produces symbols embedded in the human mind, such as miniature piggy banks and charging bulls offering the public a new perception of financial stability and its relationship with current ethical and moral values.

The artist’s constant search for new materials, in this case, 3D print technology and real coins as currency, permits interposing these financial symbols based on collective narrative issues involving values, time, and memory of historical societies and how they reflect the contemporary frame of mind. As previous series by the artist, the symbol/matter union promotes an investigation of possible dialogues between past political-economic actions and the outcome of current society.

From the artist’s point of view, history has shown a massive migration of people, known as Exodus. A clear example is the striking case of the occupation of Manhattan, not only during its period of colonization but later during an intense period at the beginning of the 20th century with the entry of immigrants from Europe through its known Ellis Island. Finally, its current consolidation as one of the largest metropolises in the world with one of the most recognized financial centers on the planet.

For this art exhibit Exodus in NY, the artist’s artistic conceptual discourse reflects on a large-scale installation combining two series of his production, Exodus and Codes. This site-specific depicts a fusion between the financial market and the Exodus. In addition, a three-dimensional aesthetical body of work from 2016 to the present will intrigue the audience with a point of discussion about the relationship between the American Way of Life finances and the effects on other contemporary societies as a multicultural phenomenon.

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WHO IS FRANGIONI?

Alexandre Frangioni is a self-taught artist born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1967, where he lives and works.
His artwork presence in international fairs and gallery exhibitions positioned him in private, corporate, and public art collections in New York, Miami, Atlanta (USA), São Paulo (Brazil), Buenos Aires (Argentina), (Lima) Peru, and Santiago de Chile (Chile).

Frangioni has participated in solo & collective exhibitions in Brazilian museums, such as; the Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto (MARP), Museu de Arte de Goiânia (MAG), Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Mato Grosso do Sul (MARCO), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Blumenau (MAB), Museu Luiz Sacilotto (Casa do Olhar), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Jataí (MAC Jataí), Pinacoteca Benedito Calixto, Museu Casa Alfredo Andersen, and Pinacoteca São Bernardo do Campo, among others.

Among art fairs & collections: SP Arte 2023, Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary 2022, SP Arte 365/Viewing Room 2021, Pinta Miami Live 2020, Art Wynwood Miami 2020, ART New York 2019, as well as other shows, like “Prelocaçao” and “o desejo do outro”, both in São Paulo. 

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Iris Burchi, an abstract female painter, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and lives and works in Mexico. She expresses herself with a passive contemplation observing the surroundings. She firmly believes everything is energy, vibrations, and changes. Her relationship with the canvas is intimate and personal. For her, painting is the space and time of a dialogue between reflection and instinct. It is a refuge where she observes the emotional world around her. Her search for beauty rests in the spontaneous, and her creativity is motivated by the concept of the infinite, making every painting an adventure in which anything is possible and where seeing herself is inevitable.

Her artwork has little to do with creating or expressing.

It is the path she travels to reinvent herself. She explores different ways of realizing her sensibility and voice to feel the magnitude of freedom. Her artistic orientation is towards sound, vibration, and the relationship between energy and emotions in the existential dynamic.

Each of her paintings captures vibrations of an intermediate temporal space, feelings, thoughts, senses, and emotions that vanish like the sound in the wind when painting.

Since 1999 she is exploring the harmony and balance of divergent expressions of life and emotions, appointing her as a remarkable abstract female painter. Her thinking deeply influenced by Michelangelo, Balthus and Kandinsky, drove her in 2004 to her first exhibition in Caracas, THE ART OF SILENCE.

Then, she mentored Felipe Romero, Rafael Silverio, and Alexi Rojas of the Marapa Archaeological Museum, in Edo. Vargas, Venezuela. During this period, rock art and lithic painting captured her attention, and the use of natural pigments along with acrylic was highlighted in her artwork.

In 2006 through a second exhibition, “Without Limits”, two of her paintings disappeared, immersing her in a state of solitude and deep questioning.

Nine years later, in 2015, she exhibited twenty paintings in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, where she currently resides and works.

She accomplished 26 acrylic paintings in 2018, Polaridades, Integrando, and Parts as an unalloyed celebration of emotions and colors, showing every one of the paintings as a living entity, one that lives in non-stop vibration inside of us and it expands in the immensity of the unknown.

Gabriel Orenstein, a Contemporary Video artist

Orenstein was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1959. He moved to Miami Fl. in 1987, where he resides and works. As a multidisciplinary and contemporary video artist, he builds videos the same way he paints, video-film is the extension of his paintings.

He becomes fascinated by exploring the roots or discovering the meaning behind every idea. One of the most powerful tools available to him is meditating. It makes him visualize as a contemporary video artist, the experience, and translate it into images. As a result, the art videos appear to him in segments, and the sequence starts the composition in a conceptual form. He knows not to try to understand the process but to trust the intuition that flows within him.

As a creator, he firmly believes we all carry a map within us that evidently leads to our inner consciousness. Simultaneously, he perceives that every image can be interpreted in an animated form and transformed into any imaginable expression.

A recent video explained how I am convinced art in motion was in the human mind since prehistoric paintings.

Video art collectors can acquire a High Definition limited edition of 5. This series with two artist proofs in a pen drive includes a beautifully crafted case and a correspondent certificate of authenticity.

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Dopico-Lerner was born in Havana, Cuba (1943-2020 ), a Contemporary Cuban artist with an exceptional career. His work is registered in the book Memoria: Cuban Art of The 20th Century. Below is outstanding writing by art critic & historian Raúl Zamudio who immediately detected the importance of the artist.

The Mind/Body Problem: On the Optic and Somatic in Vicente Dopico-Lerner’s Paintings

Cuban contemporary art, like its counterparts around the world, has gone through myriad transformations in response to sociopolitical conditions both within Cuba and outside of it. This can be seen in the broad array of Cuban artworks that are formally as well as topically diverse. Even when Cuban artists focus on local politics, their art can speak to similar dynamics in other global, geo-political contexts. This also seems axiomatic for Cuban artists who explore the human condition via artistic vocabularies devoid of recognizable cultural signifiers, yet upon further scrutiny, embody a degree of transnationalism in their ability to engage an international audience. Ditto with the Miami-based, Cuban painter Vicente Dopico-Lerner.

Vicente Dopico-Lerner is a unique artist and not only because of his distinct style, for his practice is potentially informed by other activities often not the purview of his art-making colleagues. Although his mainstay is painting, Dopico-Lerner has ventured into the fields of writing as bona fide art critic as well as museum director with its attendant curatorial responsibilities. It may seem that this trifecta of activities is emphatically delineated, but one can see the thought process of writing in Dopico-Lerner’s painting, rife with a confident métier and ostensible calligraphic meanderings of brushwork, which are not dissimilar to the mental steadfastness that accompanies the physical act of inscription. And even the manner in which Dopico-Lerner composes his paintings, in which some seem carefully designed while others appear more improvisational, are executed with a kind of curatorial acumen alluding to his work within the museum field. But it’s Dopico-Lerner’s painting that first and foremost sets him apart from his artistic peers.

Vicente Dopico-Lerner’s painting is diligent to a global art history all the while engaged with its contemporary discourse. This is underscored in a distinct formal signature that cites the past but with a sovereign freshness, not unlike other painters who have transformed their predecessors while remaining stylistically individualized. Regarding the latter, John Currin cites seventeenth-century Mannerism, Jenny Saville tropes Lucien Freud, Glenn Brown reworks Frank Auerbach, and Cecily Brown updates Willem de Kooning, to name a just a few. Vicente Dopico-Lerner too, is attendant to a history of international art in a corpus that is rich with sources that seem to have subsumed twentieth-century abstraction that developed in Europe and across the Americas. Dopico-Lerner’s artistic methodology entails, for example, swaths of color not unlike Color Field which, in turn, are in counterpoint to his swirls of pigment akin to hairline palpitations associated with Kandinsky. At other times Dopico-Lerner’s pictorial marks nod towards the drips of Jackson Pollock, and in other instances his painterly inflections have no discernible pedigree whatsoever. But another distinguishable aspect of Dopico-Lerner’s art is that he converges the visual intensities of pure abstraction with figuration resulting in a painting style imbued with formal verve and a sublime aesthetic.

Vicente Dopico-Lerner’s iconography, however, evokes the archetypal rather than mimetic renderings of the anthropomorphic. He conjures silhouette-like humanoids from the deep recesses of our collective unconscious to remind us of our common humanity. These other-worldly phantoms are simultaneously startling as they are compelling in engendering an optical delirium in the viewer. Often composed in profile or three-quarter view, the figures are mostly set within a polychromatic, pulsating pictorial space that pushes figure/ground dynamics into a paradoxical balanced disequilibrium. At other times, the poetic chaos of Dopico-Lerner’s markmaking manifests within the contours of his figures’ heads. In delineating his painterly inscriptions within these psychic borders there is allusion to the external manifestation of thought, as Dopico-Lerner’s confident brushstrokes become metaphors for thinking or some mystical type of cognitive activity. Dopico-Lerner’s compositional modus operandi creates a visually and conceptually palpable tension between the viscous surfaces of his canvases and the cerebral yet somatic quality of their being. To underscore the broad purview of Dopico-Lerner’s artistry, one need only to look when the artist consciously sets his own limitations as is the case with Under the Moon of May (2018).

Under the Moon of May is a mixed-media work on canvas that is dominated by an overall monochromatic palette. In this sense, the work is not dissimilar to historical grisaille. Grisaille was an art form that first appears in Medieval illuminated manuscripts and then later taken up by Renaissance artists and generally falling out of favor by the end of the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages, grisaille was often employed out of necessity because of inaccessibility of colors, and then deployed as undercoating across a canvas in the Renaissance and later as a way of asserting one’ artistic superiority. The latter was a rhetorical maneuver: if one could successfully articulate three-dimensional composition on a two-dimensional surface in grisaille as well as any other artist in polychrome, that would underscore the mastery of one artist over another. While this may not be the initial impetus for Dopico-Lerner to work in the monochrome, it does point to a meticulous if not conceptual approach to painting by expanding its practice vis-à-vis its chromatic limitation. There have been other painters such as Mark Tansey who are known for a conceptualist painting, and Dopico-Lerner’s Under the Moon of May is, to a lesser or greater degree, an example of this genre as well. In contrast to this cool conceptualism, however, is that Dopico-Lerner can also paint and capture a panoply of emotion in his artworks. This underscored in the expressionist and cathartic qualities that his mark-making can take evinced in Un dia cualquiera (2016).

Un dia cualquiera is a large 48 x 36 inch vertical painting of a figure in profile from the midriff looking to its right. A dominant passage in saturated yellow buoys the figure’s beautifully rendered attire of what appears to be multi-colored velvet. This rather peaceful and melancholic portrayal is offset by intense, chaotic-looking hair articulated by drips and lines of multicolored pigment that seem to fly off the figure’s head in all directions. There is undeniable beauty here that does not quite veer into the grotesque, but that stops the viewer dead in their tracks in being confronted by such contradictions: precise yet seemingly random, peaceful and concomitantly violent, warm and cool colors, and a master’s grace coupled with a neophyte’s abandon.

Vicente Dopico-Lerner’s paintings are inundated with such artistic paradoxes that make his art that much more inventive and powerful. Through the aforementioned juxtapositions of form and content, there is philosophical exegesis that the artist explores as the artistic heir of a Cartesian mind/body problem extended into aesthetic registers residing somewhere between seeing and touching, and the optical and the somatic.

Raúl Zamudio, Independent Curator, Art Critic & Historian

December 2018, New York City