DAVID T. ALEXANDER
Inscapes and the Persistence of Nature
Opening reception 5pm - 7pm Friday, October 25th - November 23rd
How do you distill the energy of endless seas and skies, monumental mountains and cliffs, and vast prairies and deserts into something more tangible? It’s something that painter David T. Alexander has endeavored to do with his work for most of his career. Whether on imposing canvases that span several feet or pieces that can be held with two hands, the exuberant, layered brushstrokes packed with color are part of a constant dialogue taking place between Alexander and the natural world.
Much of his latest work is inspired by recent explorations in New Mexico, a state he first visited in 1996 and felt immediately drawn to. “I instantly fell in love with the desert,” he recalls. “I don’t know why, but I feel extremely comfortable there – well, not comfortable because it’s not a comfortable place in the desert physically – but visually I find it astounding.”
Alexander says the work is “an amalgamation of where I’ve hiked, driven through, walked over, looked at, thought about, that is so different than where I live.” Some of the pieces show dramatic shifts between mesas and buttes, rock and sky, while others show a land patterned with sage and juniper. Many reference areas that left him quietly awestruck. “At one point I couldn’t even talk about the landscape I was looking at because it was so different than what I’ve experienced there many times. But I’m always looking for that experience – it’s got to be there for me.”
Each time Alexander puts brush to canvas or pen or pencil to paper, the end result contains a degree of that type of experience. It’s become an almost daily ceremony of endless reexamination and contemplation, of “being in a place over and over and over, until I don’t need to look anymore” Alexander states. “I can honestly say I go to bed, I dream about making art, I wake up and I make more art. I can’t stop. The inquiry is never ending.”
View work by David T. Alexander ►
NICHOLAS HERRERA | Pasión
On display
A trail of pickup trucks piled high with timber winds down a mountain road—firewood for heating residents’ homes come winter. A farmer slops new mud on his old horno oven, as his ancestors have done for centuries. A rusted metal heart containing horseshoes, gears, and nuts and bolts of all sizes, all welded together to represent that organ’s hidden inner workings. A line of penitentes (penitents) make their way to church to be blessed.
Such are the images Nicholas Herrera creates in his self-taught, almost primitive style in his studio on ancestral land in El Rito, about an hour north of Santa Fe. Life in these remote northern New Mexico villages, their yearly secular and religious rituals, and the often-harsh realities of life generally—all are woven into his works.
Herrera’s Pasión explores the finality of death and the brutality and heartbreak of war and oppression, with a good dose of current politics. That’s what’s on his mind right now.
View work by Nicholas Herrera ►
EVOKATION | art + culture + inspiration | July 2024 issue
Be aware in the present. Notice the magic and beauty of the moment. These are Jeremy Miranda’s painting mantras. Miranda finds in daily life unlimited inspiration for his paintings. The works he exhibits in Evoke’s Summer Salon are interior environments and exterior scenes close to home.
“I’m finding beauty in everything,” says Miranda, whose latest pieces include images of a pot of boiling water and a simple wooden table with two chairs. Miranda never travels far from home to find his subjects. Instead, he portrays interior and exterior scenes within a five-mile radius of his studio. “I couldn’t paint a place I visit,” he says. “I need to feel a connection to a place. When I do, I start to see the whole universe there. Then I can drift into a kind of cosmic existence when I paint.”
Other artists in the Summer Salon Part lI exhibit include David T. Alexander, Christopher Benson, Lynn Boggess, Esha Chiocchio, Jeremy Mann, Javier Marín, Louisa McElwain, Soey Milk, Kristine Poole, Lee Price, Michael Scott, Andrew Shears, Thomas Vigil, and Aron Wiesenfeld.
read past issues ►
Gallery Info
Gallery hours are: Monday through Saturday, 10 - 5.
* Gallery closed Labor Day, Monday September 2nd
You may reach us via Email and 505.995.9902 telephone messaging daily 10 - 5.
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LOOKING & SEEING
one long look at one work of art
featuring Cabeza Hombre II by Javier Marín
John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.
In 1996/97, I included Por Ti, a ¾-length, 67-inch, male nude clay sculpture by Javier Marín in the exhibition Re-presenting Representation III at the Arnot Art Museum. It arrived in several sections which we carefully stacked one on top of the other. When I asked the lender, who lived in Los Angeles, what he did in an earthquake he said, “We run and hold on to it!” It commanded the two-story gallery.
In 2001, I included a large clay Cabeza with Medusa-like hair in the exhibition Re-presenting Representation at the Corning Gallery downstairs from the Steuben showroom on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. We installed it in front of a wall we had painted Pompeiian Red at the bottom of the flight of glass stairs. It looked spectacular.
Both pieces were in clay from Oaxaca and Zacatecas--traditional, precolonial sources. The clays and clay slips gave each piece a richly mottled warm orange and red color. The permanently assembled parts of Por Ti were held together by metal staples. The sculpture came with a box of staples which we placed in their corresponding holes once we had stacked the sections.
I was attracted by the passion of the sculptures—in the pose and facial expression of Por Ti and in the ferocious intensity of the Cabeza. But Marín’s intense modeling of the clay was equally captivating. Since the figures were fired clay, I knew that he had moved his tools right there and there’s where he moved the clay around with his fingers.
Passion was on my mind, it seems, when I wrote the text for the Arnot catalogue. “Preconceptions of the Latin temperament and unbridled passion confront the viewer of the sculpture of Javier Marín. Teresa del Conde, director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, has written of Marín’s work: ‘Most of the sculptures seem to be affected by psychomachia—that is, they suggest a battle between good, seen as pleasure, and evil, seen as suffering. Pleasure is sensual and in many cases, sexual, even orgiastic. It is accompanied though by the warning of the finiteness of such pleasure and of a concomitant suffering.’ If the viewer’s preconception is that pleasure is evil and suffering, good, another level of interpretation or a mental shutdown occurs. Modeled traditionally in clay, the sculptures are assembled as fragments, the fragments themselves combining to create only the fragment of a figure. They remind the viewer of the modeling of man from clay by the biblical god, the fragmentation brought about by The Fall, and the captivating attraction to the erotic, dark unknown we find in the works of Gabriel García Márquez.”
As I wander into octogenarianhood I’m reminded of a different observation by Márquez: “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
Marín was 34 when I first showed his work. He has since gone on to cast his clay sculptures in bronze and polyester resin as well as to produce multi-colored sculptures by polymer 3D printing. The quality of his casts, fortunately, captures the immediacy of his mark making in clay.
Some years ago, when Evoke was being born at its Lincoln Avenue location, I stopped in to say “Hi” to Kathrine. She brought out a catalogue of Marín’s sculptures and asked, “Do you know this artist?” I replied in my characteristically understated way, “JAVIER MARÍN?!” I knew then that she and I were on the same wavelength. Scary, but true.
Since then, a number of his gorgeous bronze and resin sculptures have been shown at the gallery. The bronze sculpture, Cabeza Hombre II, is now on view and is an example of the passion and immediacy I admired in his clay sculptures nearly 30 years ago despite its comparatively diminutive size.
The passionate art of the Baroque period broke from the almost impossible ideals and beauty of the Renaissance.
Cabeza Hombre II embodies that passion and the beauty of the not-ideal. We see the intense emotion in the downcast eyes, the expressive lips and the twist of the body of this hombre. We see into him through holes in his chest and the back of his head. The artist’s passion is visible in the marks and movements of his modeling. Just as the clay in the early pieces is expressive of itself in its color variations, the bronze is reused, “made out of all the junk you can imagine,” he says. “The result is a bronze with a very stained skin, really dirty… I want to respect that, if it’s stained it’s for some reason. Plus, it is very beautiful.”
The piece makes us aware of the process of its making, a process that reflects our own making and our remaking as well as our pursuing our dreams.
Marín has widely broadened his scope since I first showed his work in 1996. My favorite is the spectacular Retablo, the composition-winning multi-figure altarpiece for, appropriately, the Cathedral Basilica of Zacatecas, Mexico.
In 2013 he created the Fundación Javier Marín. The foundation states, “We harness the creative nature of human beings as a tool for social development. We build programs that support the professionalization of artists, artisans, designers and different actors involved in cultural activity.”
