Luis Roldán: “Circunstancias”

October 15 – November 14 of 2009

Galería Casas Riegner is pleased to present the new show by Colombian, New York-based artist Luis Roldán.
In this series composed of paintings, drawings, paper cuts, video and sculpture, Roldán reflects on moments of introspection that appear and disappear, like cycles in the artist’s life. In these moments, the artist’s physical and transcendent relationship with its own practice and what it generates in the outside world is made evident, almost tangible.

Roldán draws from “The Captive” by Marcel Proust, in the fifth volume of “In Search of Lost Time”, where the sudden death of Mr.Bergotte is described.
The character drops dead, victim of a stroke, apparently produced by the exhaustive contemplation of a detail ( a “little patch of yellow” ) in the painting “View of Delft” by Ver Meer.
This detail seems to contain, in his eyes, an ideal synthesis of what an integral, accurate work of art should be.

…. “”That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.”. ….

This fragment denoting Mr. Bergotte’s epiphany when observing the preciousness of Ver Meer’s painting, leads the artist to point out to the importance of the surface in a pictorial sense. He departs from this instance to further explore the surface in a wider sense, as a projection of our thoughts in our daily life. The surface shows, but doesn’t contain, it acts as a reflection and takes us back to our memories.
Color, be it vibrant and penetrating or opaque and light, is always intangible.
Diverse pictorial worlds are recreated in surfaces, but they remain nothing more than these, mere painted surfaces.
In this show, the artist tries to generate this astonishment in the visitors, to stimulate other open thoughts in them .

Luis Roldán represented Colombia in the 53rd Venice Bienal in 2009, was the winner of the Luis Caballero price in 2000, had a solo show at Sicardi Gallery in Houston in 2009 and has had shows at the Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires, at the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, El Museo del Banco de la República in Bogotá, among others. His work is part of the collections of el Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cisneros Foundation, Teorética in Costa Rica, among others.