NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art announces Ricardo Mazal & Paul Bloch: Refined Abstractions. The show will run August 31 – October 5, 2019.
Ricardo Mazal’s interest in the anthropological practices of diverse global cultures, their spiritual rites, rituals and sacred places comes to the fore in his artistic expression. Through the use of photography, print-making, and the latest digital and video technology, Mazal achieves transformational perspectives and brings formal principles of composition into his work. Rigid blocks of color, flatness, folds, ribbons, stillness and texture have evolved over the span of decades to become the recognizable aesthetic for which he is known. The exhibition will feature paintings from the Bhutan Abstractions series, geometric and organic compositions that resulted from a family trip he took in 2014. Referencing Bhutanese prayer flags billowing in the wind, some of these paintings are flowing arabesques while others follow more hardline interplays of tone, color and texture, interrupted by visual hints of the region’s snow-capped vertiginous strata.
Another group of paintings alluding to geological terrain is his Violet Series, though in this series the geographic location referenced is closer to his home in New Mexico. These paintings offer a more minimalist colorfield rendering with tonal variations of deep violets, purples, midnight blues, reds and blacks -- colors associated with the shifting light during dawn and dusk. However, for Mazal this series is less about a physical location and more about unlocking the emotive, spiritual and mystical qualities of the color violet. He achieves the synthesis of background and foreground by bifurcating his composition, using hand-made squeegees to make refined surfaces, and contrasting them with grooved blocks made with the tips of paintbrushes.
Mazal divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, New York and his native Mexico City, and his works are in many public and private collections around the world. He has had over fourteen solo museum exhibitions in Mexico and the United States, and his work was included in Frontiers Reimagined, a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Paul Bloch has been using traditional methods with hand-powered chisels and other tools to carve sculpture out of solid marble and limestone. He tackles the material directly without the use of preparatory models or maquettes, maximizing its limits and volume to create beautifully abstracted three-dimensional forms. Bands, coils, twists and turns emerge out of the hard stone, creating balance and tensions between positive and negative space. Bloch approaches his sculpture-making with improvisation much as a jazz musician would, instinctually treating and coaxing the rigid marble as if it were as malleable as clay or a soft metal. Years in Carrara, Italy, where he quarries most of his stone, taught him to refine his understanding, skills and clarity as a sculptor, much like the Renaissance masters who also sourced the ancient material from the same site. Bloch ships the stone from Italy to his studio in New Mexico where he completes the work. He has had group and solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe and his sculptures are in many private and corporate collections here and abroad.
