NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art is presenting “Paradigm Shifts,” a group exhibition featuring paintings by Charles Arnoldi, Ricardo Mazal and Manuel Mérida. The show opened on September 14th and will run through November 25th.
The artists in this exhibition explore the potential of painting as a medium, challenging its normative paint application and structure. Whether selecting pigments in their primordial form, applying them with non-traditional tools, or presenting irregular supports, these artists break with convention all-the-while maintaining an aesthetic foothold in modernism.
Charles Arnoldi has had a decades-long distinguished career as an artist investigating the formal aspects of paintings and sculpture. Shapes, color, and proportion are motifs he continually revisits in his work, suggesting architectural elements or forms seen in nature, such as tropical plant life. The show will feature Arnoldi’s geometric abstractions, colorful balances of rigid grids containing gestural arcs. Some of these compositions are disrupted by the non-uniform shapes of his canvases. Arnoldi paints on individual panels and later assembles them, at times leaving them un-aligned and making way for gaps and irregular edges. The nature of the hard-edged geometric compositions becomes more apparent with the play between the foreground and background and their spatial relationships. A numerous award recipient, Arnoldi has been featured in many international exhibitions and his work is extensively collected in private, corporate and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, The Menil Collection, Houston, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Ricardo Mazal explores themes of spirituality in his abstract paintings, using vibrant colors and refined, minimal forms that can have smooth or finely textured surfaces. Mazal achieves these effects with an unorthodox pigment application, using rubber tipped blades or carved out grooves on the tips of paintbrushes. Starting with photography in what he defines to be the bridge between reality and abstraction, Mazal manipulates digital imagery to arrive at his sketches. Some canvases have grid compositions with contrasting palettes, creating a formal balance of tension and harmony. These geometric abstractions draw from Mazal’s personal investigations of sacred burial rituals in various cultures across the globe. The Bhutan series references colorful prayer flags bestowing their blessings to the wind in the region. Other paintings in the show recall the terrain of national parks outside his home in Santa Fe, geological strata that have been carved out of the bedrock over the ages. A leading artist from Mexico, Mazal has been featured in many exhibitions in the Americas, Asia and Europe and his work is included in the permanent collections of Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Maeght Foundation in Paris, among others.
Manuel Mérida is another artist who originally hailed from Latin America before moving to Paris where he currently resides. His work does not conform to the traditional notion that painting is an oil on canvas. Instead, he presents brightly colored pigments in their primal form: powder. These monochromatic colors are encased in a round frame set to rotate at a steady, consistent speed, causing the powdered pigment to move. The work is in perpetual motion, creating new gestures of forms, light, shadow and space that continually shift and are never the same. Mérida was greatly influenced by contemporary kinetic and constructivist artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Lygia Clark whom he met when he emigrated to France in the late 1960s. However, he considers himself to be a gestural painter rather than a kinetic artist. Mérida has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Latin America and Europe and his work is in many collections including the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas.
