Three Graces

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on February 8, 2014 at 3:44pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

Three Graces is a fine and receptive collage, whimsically challenging Western versus Asian aesthetic sensibility.   The Classically stylized women in the center of the piece nicely balance the geometrically patterned motif along the perimeter of the work, but the collages hard versus softer edged triangles and squares offer much more than a framing device, as they activate the space with pure geometric abstraction.  I particularly like the restrained use of more decorative and delicate floral patterns among the solid color blocking and ‘pointing’ shapes, as they fluidly weave together disparate sections to balance the floating visual weight of the picture.   The interruption of the focal figures with an irregular border and intermingled blue square also breaks the formality and practicability of the overall design. Looking off in three different directions, the gazes of the women complement and echo the lively and dispersed pictorial movement.  It’s difficult to see conceptual or even formal threads connecting your various painting and collage on the site.  There seems to be a great deal of experimentation with figure-ground relationships and degrees of representation.  But Mercado is another piece that attracts me, for quite different visual solutions.  The market scene has a pale mystique that is faintly nostalgic, if not for the traditional subject matter as much as the sense of a faded or muted sensory experience. The seated features and their sundry pots blend into their surroundings through repeated form and diminished value contrast, offering a somewhat hushed if not harmonized concordance.