CARLOS AQUILINO
Spinning Color
ARTIFACT
84 Orchard St
NY NY 10002
212 475 0448
info@artifactnyc.net
Reception: March 7, 2014, 7–9 PM
Dates: March 7–30, 2014
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6 PM
PRESS RELEASE
Carlos Aquilino’s paintings and sculptures announce themselves with a playful confidence and exuberance. At the heart of this artist’s work is his evident impulse to offer the viewer an experience that is grounded in material reality (hence the strongly felt use of silhouette-like outlines that remind us of objects of cultic value) yet keenly aware of the need for an interplay of immateriality, and a reference to a transcendent reality to co-exist within each work.
Aquilino’s sculptures representing interlaced acrylic painted pieces of foam board are resolutely non-objective. Yet, they articulate pictorially a need for an exchange between an echo of the mimetic and an equally adamant desire to renounce explicit subject matter. On the other hand, the subject matter of figurative imagery fills Aquilino’s colorful works on paper.
This simultaneous divergence is the chief quality in the artist’s work and it is the source of magical omnipotence that exudes from both paintings and sculptures. Each of these are made manifest in Aquilino’s artwork that is focused on presenting to the spectator an experience that relates to interplay between movement, mass and color. More particularly the artist suggests through the careful balancing of organic and non-organic visual codes in his work that he works from things that are man-made or natural or a combination of the two.
Thus a complex process of interaction between making and matching, suggestion and projection, takes place every time the eye and mind of the viewer confronts his configurations and their titles. The stepped formations and blue wing in Double Perspective, for example, refer both to architecture and to the animal world. The emblematic and monochromatic configurations in Pyngyuan might just as easily infer a rocket booster, a ritual house or a fertility symbol.
Such polymorphic richness is just another facet of the artist’s work’s evident joy in confounding our sense of what is real and what is not through Aquilino’s deftly conjured-up spatial play. The careful study of shadows of natural objects and their masses is keenly sensed in this complex work as is the artist’s superb design sense and his appreciation for textural and proportional play. The result is an immersion in the dynamics of form, structure and gesture whose primary claim to authenticity is the effortless, seemingly casual sense of inevitability that greets the viewer in each of Carlos Aquilino’s work.
For more information and visuals please contact the gallery.