NEO GEOMETRIC REALM

Neo Geometric Realm

Essay by Gabriel Diego Delgado

*** Excerpted text of article follows images****

Read full article in the jan. 2017 edition of Plumage-TX Magazine at:

https://issuu.com/gdelgado2010/docs/plumage_tex_jan_2017_12-22-2016_fin

 

 

In viewing the new works by San Antonio artists Louis Vega Trevino, Jorge Purón, and Marc Wiegand at Mercury Project, in the titled exhibition, Neo Geometric Realm –what needs to be understood is the conceptual underpinnings of the art, the chosen title, and the conceptual connotations.  Without accounting for these intellectual peripherals, the audience might not truly appreciate all aspects of this contemporary exhibition. Although smaller in scale than most group exhibitions, 13 plus paintings by these three artists are exhibited around the gallery and main lobby giving an alternating visual of varied takes on post-minimal geometric abstractions. Visually vacillating from Louis to Jorge to Marc, there is a great democratic approach to the layout of the exhibition which shows common respect and admiration for each other, with no one artist stealing the spotlight. With showing artwork similar in application, aesthetic and revered historical contexts, that is often hard to do. 

Now let’s jump into the thick of it. Yes these are pretty paintings to look at, yes they are minimal, yes they are colorful, and yes they are arrangements of simple geometric shapes that make up a comprised composition of the artists’ liking, but there is more, yes more, but you have to spend the time to allow these thoughts to mature. 

The Tate Gallery in London, states that “Neo-Geo is short for neo-geometric conceptualism…artwork that is influenced by the style of earlier developments in the twentieth century art – such as minimalism, pop art, and op art.”

New York Times writer, Grace Glueck wrote in 1987 on Neo-Geo, is that “part of the problem is that in true post-Modernist spirit, much of the art does not really constitute a movement, but a raid on movements of the past.”

 

Yes indeed, there has to be permission to draw from the past to move forward, and these three artists are doing just that. With a strong sense of placement and unique artistic choices, each artist arrives at this particular place in time, this era of art history, armed with knowledge and understanding of what came before him, but the courage to move beyond it – a fearlessness to explore unexplored avenues in their own work. This is one of the non-visual underlying conceptual perimetric points that I have uncovered. 

On Op-Art, the Tate states, “The effects created by op art ranged from the subtle, to the disturbing and disorienting. Op painting used a framework of purely geometric forms as the basis for its effects and also drew on color theory and the physiology and psychology of perception.” Good now we are getting somewhere...Bullseye Jorge Purón!

Jorge Purón, an artist mostly known for over two decades of Abstract Expressionism, delivers hard –edged “halo-ized” paintings that seem to almost vibrate; concocted out of a mixer of overt color theory decisions using bold complimentary colors that seem to head-butt each other to more subtle almost submissive, passive aggressive qualities of restrained and refined line quality that would make Barnett Newman proud. To reinforce a point, sometimes these almost invisible lines book-end and border some larger shapes, giving these flat shapes the appearances of having shadows and/ or glowing geometric halos; a small package with major impact.  

So, change is inevitable, this we all know. Shape-Shifter Blue Red, a foursquare of blue diamonds with compromised red accents by Purón was one of his first multi-paneled color based paintings. “This ‘shift’ came about out of a necessity”, he said. “I had limited space in my new studio. I became interested in how color and space could be disturbed by a single line. Five years ago I made a shift in my life. I had a sort of epiphany. I wanted a cleaner look…I wanted to get rid of excessive brushstrokes, I wanted more open space.  This affected my personal life too. I purged…I saw I had excessive amounts of clothes and shoes…I started to get rid of things. Then, I looked for different ways to do my art.”

In his series called Plurilinea, he is investigating intersecting points. “This series started when I bought my new house”, Purón says. “It is right by some overhead train tracks on the east side [of San Antonio]…my house shakes when a train goes by.”  Visually, the artwork is inheritably tied to these formal structures – intersecting grids of urban development, industrial movement and delineation of accessibility through mathematical engineering. But, Purón goes beyond this, “there is a philosophical aspect of the paintings”, he says. “The ideas of where will the roads take you, where can you go…the choices for the paths…which road will you go down?”

This artist’s fundamental understanding of his own art adequately reflects another point. As quoted by Glueck, Neo-Geo artist, Peter Halley wrote, ‘‘Simulation, is the fact of technical mediation replacing the natural thing…i.e. air conditioning is a simulation of air; movies are a simulation of life; life is simulated by bio-mechanical manipulations.''  

Here, Purón starts at the simulation of the technical, the overhead train tracks, sees these structures daily, an unconscious meditation due to repetition, but purposefully morphs these concepts into a ‘visual language of modern life.’ A prime example of all this can be seen in the red and blue triangle shaped painting, Plurilinea #8.  The intersecting lines, the refined aesthetic, and the minimal composition.  “The geometry of the shaped canvas is an influence of Louis Vega Trevino”, he proudly admits. “He is the master of shaped canvases. We often visit each other’s studios and talk about ideas and critique each other’s work.” By affirming the obvious, Purón gives credit to his fellow peer, and displays a regard of mutual recognition for a like-minded artist in the same field of defined minimalism. 

There is a dichotomy that Purón explains. “It is restraint vs. the older abstraction. The older work satisfied an emotional side. The new work satisfies an intellectual side.”

“Do you wonder what road you can take and where it will lead Mr. Purón?”  You have already taken the metaphysical road, my friend. But, you unwittingly took the audience with you - starting at the subliminal, going past the conceptual and arriving at the physical. 

Minimalism – the movement in art to strip down emotion, and symbology; nix the biography of the artist and metaphors. Minimalists concentrated on form, properties of the material and achieved a nihilistic approach to abstraction with a refined and often mechanical preciseness to the artwork. L.T.V. you got this. 

Louis Vega Trevino, a prolific artist who calls San Antonio home illustrates his passion to keep evolving, to keep changing, and to give the world his best foot forward in all his artistic endeavors. This can be seen in his new artwork for Neo Geometric Realm with his ‘re-shaped’ canvases. Usually Trevino has a singular or a set of segmented geometric-shaped canvases arranged on a wall to make new obtuse or acute forms. Now, Trevino has switched up his game; launching a fundamental break through. No longer is he dependent on the compositional arrangements he can make with his painterly sections, but the seemingly arbitrary shapes themselves are now made out of a single piece of constructed and stretch canvas; retooling his belt in Fort Worth at the Modern Art Museum. Here, he saw the retrospective of Modernist painter, Frank Stella. “I saw how he [Frank Stella] cut open the canvas, like a butterfly, to cover those angles and edges [of the shaped canvases]. This gave me sense of a new direction”, says Trevino.  

“First I would make the shapes, and not color them. Then, the paintings are put into the segment shapes of what I usually make. So now there are areas of white left blank…of white enamel…there are shapes within shapes…I think what I have done takes Cojones. To leave this much white on the canvas takes confidence”, he says. 

In the new work, Trevino is relying as much on the negative space in the composition as he is the segmented and inserted stripe painting areas. A visual paradox of origami-esque configurations, the painted segments seem to fold and flip over and under the negative space. There is more than just a symbiotic relationship between the shapes in the canvas. They rely, play, bend, bounce, cover and intersect one another. 

In Poster Trevino gives us an angled bowtie shape impregnated with a centralized green serape-like form that seems to be overtaking a small red triangle on the upper right of the composition. Although the green form dominates in size, the small triangle mimics the three white negative spaces; giving it more clout. It’s like there is power in numbers, the red triangle kicks ass by association in this small pictorial of a geometric battle royal. All pigments in “Poster” are painted in the signature Louis Vega Trevino feathered and blended lines of color rhythms. 

In a two piece configuration titled Direct, Trevino marries the two worlds; the old with the new to show how they can intermingle in some sort of artist cross-species, Dr. Moreau experiment. In my feeble attempt to understand the complexity of Direct, I struggle to place it into a categorical realm where I can analyze it. It is as if an Oriental fan is placed above a half torn piece of the elementary school magic box game where I would give my favorite color, and the word “black’ is spelled out- b.l.a.c.k …and I flip up the side of the open puzzle to reveal who has a crush on me. But instead, the flips are angled paintings within shapes, born of one another, made out of the left over spaces. Angles, edges, and corners are matched and mirrored to give birth to new shapes, new edges and new compositions. The hovering aspect of the top shape is almost like a comforting mother, looming over her offspring. Protecting it, nurturing it and guiding it. There is not a menacing feeling between the two but more of a protector of innocence.  I feel this is only the beginning of a new journey for Trevino as he progresses past the pieces of a whole to give rise to new patterns. He has anxiously arrived at a new commencement of conceptual application. Watch for Trevino to continue exploding forward with his unique minimalist structure with new support, interest, and collectors in Dallas and Houston.

Neo Geo as a mislabeled movement and quasi-contemporary genre, is a “language concerned with the ‘geometricisation’ of modern life”, says the Tate. So, here’s looking at you Marc Wiegand!

Wiegand, a San Antonio Attorney at Law, is an analytical-type professional turned artist. An avid supporter of the Texas art community, Wiegand is drawing on his methodical approaches to understanding his environment to arrive at an art-making process and constructed visual conclusion; a change from appreciator to producer. Unlit light boxes of various sizes are interspersed between Trevino and Purón’s line paintings. These light boxes consist of various sizes of cut and colored Plexiglas. The arrangements of the plastic glass within the frame allude to metropolitan environments, miniature cityscapes that are enclosed; hidden behind a protective barrier. Segments of frosted acrylic obscure parts of the composition, while others act as windows to these Peter Halley-ish constructs. In other arrangements within the exhibition, Wiegand has various adornments of the traditional tic-tac-toe board inlaid with rolling dice; sculptural 3-D ‘paintings’ that cluster like some strewn kids game across the wall. 

In El Incontable Ua Vez (The Uncountable Once), an acrylic and fluorescent panel measuring 7.5” x 40” x 3.5”, we almost see an architectural rendition of the contemporary office space. As if the artist took a side profile of an office, sliced off the internal wall and showed the dissected side of urban America. Heavy borders of grey acrylic give the arrangement a movie film feel, with us viewing the passing of the images. The blurred effect of the outside Plexiglas gives a notion of movement. The glowing edges of the acrylic in the framed composition give off an eerie halo of office fluorescence.  Neo-Pop furniture, desks, tables, rooms, and more show the current conditions of uber-contemporary office life; morphing into a Post-Pop hyper-color reality of urban revitalization. 

Yes, Neo Geometric Realm takes you on a journey through decades of intellectual art history discourse, showing you individual takes on minimalist principles and how precisions, dedication and formal compositional decisions can bring about change and evolution.