Lyrical Abstractions

Lyrical Abstractions

BY LISA ITO

A tribute to Galleria Duemila’s founder and art director Silvana Ancelloti-Diaz, this exhibition by three of the gallery’s consistent exhibiting artists through the decades offers three individual moments of rumination through abstraction.

The moving gesture is explored in Trek Valdizno’s suite of four paintings for the show. Valdizno combines four intense pigments—black, white and red against gold—and large brush strokes to produce grand, calligraphic forms. The resulting images stand out and shimmer against the light, denoting the power and movement of blithe and robust flight. The titles of each work are fleeting poetic moments: connoting, for instance, a turn of thought or a revelatory moment.

The tangible physicality and texture of pure pigment, on the other hand, can be experienced firsthand in Jonathan Olazo’s canvases. Olazo presents paintings which are each built up through layers of short, overlapping dabs and taps of acrylic and oil paint: producing layered, impressionistic images. The paintings are either vertically or horizontally oriented, hinting at the conventions of portrait or landscape paintings. Each is lyrically titled: offering a seeming recollection of vivid vignettes spanning memories of tranquil moonlit nights by the sea to poetic impressions of “the messenger with beautiful feet”.

DETAIL OF JONATHAN OLAZO’S “CY IN LITTTLE CHINA” (2018)