Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Pulso Latino: Latino Art Exhibit




NEW IN NOVEMBER
AT ZUCOT GALLERY



PULSO LATINO
A Group Exhibition of Hispanic Artists


STANLEY BERMUDEZ - PEDRO FUERTES - ELIO GUEVARA - CARLOS SOLIS






OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, November 12, 2010 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
at ZuCot Gallery
(click here for driving directions)

Peruvian Band APU INKA Performing

Exhibition Runs Through January 30, 2010

zucotgallery.com

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Gallery 4463 Registry exhibit

Oil on Canvas 30" x 24"


Gallery 4463 Registry Exhibit

When:   11/06/10
Where:  Gallery 4463 LLC 4463 Cherokee St.
              Acworth, Georgia USA 30301


Time: Reception and Awards Presentation Saturday, Nov 6th 6-9pm 
Exhibit runs from November 6th to 28th



Artists: Carlos Solis, Pedro Fuertes, Jose Pena, Baba, Don Maier, Robert Meredith, Elizabeth Chapman and more.

404 808 9971
www.gallery4463.com
gallery4463.com/gallery/v/C/Solis_Carlos

Friday, October 8, 2010

My Interpretation of the Venezuelan Revolution

I am an artist who does not believe in the current revolution of Venezuela

After years of watching Chavez’s regime take over my country of Venezuela, and in protest of his politics and his actions against our people and against democracy,  I decided to paint this piece.
Chavez always says he is an admirer and follower of Bolivar.  He states he wants to follow Bolivar’s steps towards what Bolivar wanted Venezuela to be: one country, one people, one voice, brothers and sisters all united.  However, Chavez’s actions seems to be more radical and far from what Bolivar’s dream was supposed to be.
Chavez has become the oppressor.  A totalitarian leader who wants to control every aspect of their life.  he wants to control the things they see, the things they hear and the things they believe in.  There are few people and few voices who have chosen to fight against this abusive actions of Chavez.
To interpret this painting it is necessary to understand the current situation in Venezuela.
When I think about Chavez and how he quotes Bolivar and uses Bolivar as a symbol of the revolution, I started to think “What would Bolivar think about what Chavez is doing to his country?”
So I imagined the spirit of Bolivar coming down from heaven, riding his white horse, looking at exactly what is happening to his people.  The long legs of the white horse represent the elevated status of Bolivar compared to the average citizen. The red mannequins on the ground represent the followers of Chavez and his revolution.  Mannequins are just shells of individuals.  They are blinded by hatred and they are mindlessly following their leader.  The white mannequins are passive-just watching it all happen without taking a stand against the corruption and the rising dictatorship of Chavez.
In protest of the current situation in Venezuela, the white horse is “dumping” on the red ground which represents the color used by Chavez as a symbol of the revolution.
In the sky, the angel on the left side symbolizes the divine presence of God indicating justice will come for those who are oppressing and persecuting those who oppose the regime of Chavez.
The cathedral on the right side is from the city of Maracaibo, in the state of  Zulia which represents one of the few states in Venezuela that strongly oppose the current views and politics of Chavez.
Also notice the colors of the flag of Venezuela is present in the entire painting from top to bottom.
I welcome any comments or questions about this painting.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Art Partners Presents High Arts Day

Size: 12" x 10" Medium: Oil on canvas

I'm happy to announce that I'm going to have the opportunity to show one painting at the High Museum this October.



What: Breakfast & shopping, Luncheon, Home Tours and Exhibit

When: Sunday, October 24, 2010 6:00PM to 9:00PM

Monday, November 15, 2010

Where: High Museum of Art

Audience: Supporters of the Arts

2009 Leading Support: Georgia Power

Cost:  $150 per person for 1 ticket to High Arts Day
$ 500 for Gold Petron includes 2 tickets to Gold Patron Party and 1
ticket to High Arts Day

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Art imitates life in The Surrealist Next Door at Wm Turner

www.burnaway.org

Art imitates life in The Surrealist Next Door at Wm Turner
September 20, 2010
By Jerry Cullum

Peter Hamblin, Fly NYC, 2002, ink-jet print made from unretouched solarized 4-x-5 inch film negative, 24 x 32 inches. Photo courtesy Wm Turner gallery.

John Morse’s life took a surreal turn recently when Keep Atlanta Beautiful’s complaint against his roadside haiku signs made the news from the London Guardian to The New Yorker, and on to Canada and South Africa in short order.

It seemed a confirmation of the hypothesis behind The Surrealist Next Door, Morse’s first curatorial effort at Wm Turner gallery: namely, that ordinary life is now so surreal that depictions of life as it is are themselves already surrealist artworks.

The Kevlar-clad bike couriers photographed by Peter Hamblin are probably the most direct illustration of Morse’s thesis, though a close runner-up might be Michaele McCarthy’s photo of dueling red Wall Street Journal and blue New York Times newspaper boxes, their adjacent symbolic competition interrupted by a “Read the Koran” graffito chalked on the NYT box.

Morse’s preoccupations seem based on the belief that 9-11 altered American experience fundamentally. Branda Mangum’s quilt that is also, vaguely, an American flag rhymes in this respect with Brice Hammack’s World Trade Towers collage in which the towers are pillars of sky and cloud set at an angle to the sky behind them. For Morse, the trauma of September 11, 2001, unsettled our collective perception in the same way that the First World War did for the Surrealists, as it had for the Dadaists who preceded them.

David Stark, Vision of Lust in Retrospect, 2009, multi-grain bread, clock mechanism, 5 x 3.25 inches, mixed media on wood panel, 32 x 52 x 2 inches. Photo courtesy Wm Turner gallery.

Perhaps the present’s improbable events actually do intersect with our unconscious intuitions in ways not dissimilar from the original generation of Surrealists—who maintained that they were illustrating the insights of Sigmund Freud, including his thoughts on jokes and the unconscious.

But despite the popular perception of the original Surrealists’ intent, for them humorous incongruity wasn’t sufficient to render something surreal. A certain degree of unsettling weirdness (or “the uncanny,” what Freud called unheimlich) was required in order to engage unconscious process and set surreality in motion.

The Surrealists also aimed to overturn the established order by alternating between the uncanny and canny parody, and this impulse is reflected in some works in Morse’s show but not all of them. (However, today’s “surrealist next door” may operate by different definitions of the concept than the movement of the 1930s. This needs clarification.)

Morse’s self-declared “survey of contemporary surrealist art” is a mixed bag throughout, containing everything from a thoroughly unheimlich video by the globally famous Eve Sussman to a digital collage by emerging artist and gallery intern Claire Elise Tippins. The remaining works by (mostly) New York and Atlanta artists range from daringly conceptual to one-liner witty.

One of the most interesting works in the show, Mark Gordon’s exhibition soundtrack The Surrealist Next Score may be the best bridge between Morse’s idea of the surreality of the ordinary and the strategies of historical Surrealist art.

The most blatant reference to the original strategies is probably Hartmut Paul’s En Plein Water, which reprises Magritte’s perfect match of a canvas on an easel with the landscape behind it in La Condition Humaine. Paul’s painting substitutes a tossing ocean, adding kinetic humor to Magritte’s placidly stable but profoundly disturbing vision of the ideal meeting of world and art.

One might find traditional surrealist linkages of sex and death mirrored in Elyse Defoor’s Pandora, an image of a black swimsuit crafted from spent ammunition cartridges. Customary surrealist mockery of religious objects is found here in R. Land’s alien creature overlaid on a found painting of Jesus, and in Ford Rogers’ The Shorts of Turin, a pair of boxer shorts on which the anatomical part left unseen in the Shroud of Turin’s imprinted figure appears in all its sacrilegious glory.

Oliver Jeffers, Adolf Dalí, 2009, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy Wm Turner gallery.

Cameron Snow’s small portraits of costumed children are more goth-lowbrow than surrealist, but Snow’s uncanny devotion to psychoanalytically charged transgression curiously confirms Morse’s hypothesis of an indefinable link between past and present surrealities. These kids look scary, and not because of their pirate or witch outfits. Girl #5 (princess) sports a black eye and a defiant sneer that suggests she gave as good as she got.

The most authentic expression of historical Surrealist practice, however, is to be found in a thematic juxtaposition that includes John Morse’s own 2008 maquette of a chair balanced atop a sawn-off tree stump. Morse’s work strikes resonance with Carlos Solis’s 2010 painting of a similar chair-and-stump arrangement, above which a bird is delivering an egg to a waiting nest as a small child watches from the ground.

Seeing this painting, Morse told Solis, “I made a sculpture of this painting before you painted it.” It is a moment that could have come from André Breton’s Nadja or from Louis Aragon’s eyewitness reports of uncanny coincidences. It utterly transforms two works that otherwise would be simply additional iterations of familiar surrealist tropes.

Monday, September 20, 2010

“ALTERED REALITY”, Group Exhibition. Artist’s Reception,” Time: 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm. Location: LINCOLN EXHIBITION SPACE Lincoln Hospital, 234 East 149th Street, Bronx, NY 10451, Tel.: 347 929 6579

Altered Reality” explores how individuals influence each with their behavior,
culture and in doing so how people effect and shape their environment.
Recent research has shown that even those peripherally around an
individual shape and change that person’s behavior and habits.

Taken on a larger scale, these gestures and beliefs go to construct the society
we live in and shape all that is around us. The artists in “Altered
Reality” take their focus from a multiplicity of vantage points, and
they show the various characteristics and expressions that people put
...in motion in their creation of the society, of themselves and the
settings that they live in.

 

“ -Artists: Auberto Baque, Carlos Solis, Christian Gonzalez, Enrique Gomez, Fernando Peñalosa...September 18 to November 24, 2010