Catalogo para exposición Jesus Matheus by Pedro Mancilla

JesĂşs Matheus. Form. Sign. Place.

Contents Foreword Cecilia de Torres

The Ideogram of Place Sited Ideograms Juan Ledezma

9 11

Retrospective Survey Form as Place as Form JesĂşs Matheus

45 47

Tectonics 2014-2012

Steles 2013-2010

Squares 2012-2008

The White Studio 2008

Bolts, Echoes and Stepped Forms 2008-2002

Chronology Collections and Past Exhibitions

xhibition Works E Credits

77 84 86 88

Cecilia de Torres

Foreword I met Jesús Matheus in Caracas many years ago. Since the 1950s, the Venezuelan capital has been a vital center for modern art. The exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts were exceptional, and modern art was everywhere in the city’s public spaces. If you were caught in a traffic jam, you could look at a sculpture by Alejandro Otero in a plaza, and if you attended an event in the university’s auditorium, Alexander Calder’s Clouds, his largest work, took your breath away. You can’t avoid the impact of the huge hanging mural by Jesús Rafael Soto at the Teresa Carreño theater, and arriving at the Maiquetía Airport, you walk on a splendid kinetic mosaic designed by Carlos Cruz-Diez that seemingly extends forever from a wall mural. By constant exposure to modern art, the taste of Caracas’s residents was unconsciously shaped as they lived amidst geometric abstraction of the highest quality. Matheus grew up in the environment, where the inexhaustible language of abstraction was omnipresent, and I believe it spoiled him to any other possible stylistic expression. He was involved in studying Amerindian art in the 1990s, searching for a Latin American version of abstraction in the constructive nature of pre-Hispanic art. In his work there are many references to Amerindian signs like the ray and the totem, key symbols that he has he reworked in many variations. Matheus’s approach to art isn’t’ contentious, provocative, or unsettling, but rather reflects a slow and sure conquest of form. As in the case of many important innovations, his discoveries are quiet, and take time to comprehend. Since 2005, Matheus has lived in Boston, where his work has evolved into a very personal version of geometric expression.

Altar T, 2014 Oil on canvas and painted wood 71 x 48 x 1½ in. 180,3 x 121,9 x 3,8 cm.

We are fortunate that Juan Ledezma, the Venezuelan art historian and curator who specializes in the Russian avant-garde and Latin American geometric abstraction, accepted our invitation to curate this exhibition. I admire his exacting eye and his original point of view. Ledezma worked closely with the artist to develop a unique concept, reflected in the exhibition’s title, “The Ideogram of Place.” Through their composition, texture, and color, Matheus’s works on view reference the architecture of the gallery space. Thus, the artist has painted and varnished the wood planes in paintings such as Pizarras and Altarpiece (both 2014) to evoke the natural grain and knots of the nineteenth century loft’s wood ceiling, beams, and columns. Similarly, organized into tight clusters or carefully positioned against the blank expanse of the gallery wall, Ledezma’s studied arrangement of Matheus’ art interacts with the architectural planes and volumes of the gallery.

Page 2-3

Altarpiece, 2014 Acrylic and oil on canvas, painted wood 73 x 85 x 4 in. 185,4 x 215,9 x 10,1 cm.

We are pleased to have the opportunity to introduce Jesús Matheus to New York, where his work opens a new path in the language of abstraction. 7

The Ideogram of Place

October 2014

Ideogram/Form 2014 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. 152,4 X 152,4 cm.

Juan Ledezma

Sited Ideograms 1 Linear, chromatic and planar relations define an abstract field. The sheer matter of line, color and plane confronts us as a concrete, obdurate and substantive ground. The distinction between an abstract and a concrete field as two areas where forms deploy themselves marked early non-objective art. Yet, in the 1930s, that distinction became a division—a site of confrontation that reflected the gaping contradictions of modern culture. Theo van Doesburg remarked on it in an attempt to redefine his work. And so did Joaquín Torres-García, who approached the division in question as the separation between intellectual and physical planes pried open by the thrust of “modern mechanical progress.”1

Joaquín Torres-García (1928) “Decadence and Primitivism”; reprinted in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed. Joaquín Torres-García. Constructing Abstraction in Wood (Houston, Texas: The Menil Collection, 2010), pp. 177–178; and “Theo van Doesburg,” in Rolinda Kattow, ed., The Antagonistic Link: Joaquín Torres-García and Theo van Doesburg (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991), p. 54. 1

Quoted in Cecilia Buzio de Torres, “The School of the South: The Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1934–1942, in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed. El Taller Torres-García. The School of the South and Its Legacy (Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 7. 2

Quoted in Ramírez, Joaquín Torres-García, p. 38. 3

Modernity’s divisive logic, the Uruguayan artist believed, had overcome Europe. South America, on the other hand, appeared to him as a still unspoiled territory—a continent where the contradictions of modern society could be superseded by reconnecting the material density of concrete life to the operations of abstract reason. According to a diagram dated around 1938, that reconnection would result in a renewed unity cemented at the site of “construction.” As per the same diagram, the reunification of a halved world would be secured by the encounter between the “rhythms” of perceived reality and constructive “rules,” such as the grid’s “law of frontality,” that bore an absolute validity. Torres-García defined such an encounter as “the nexus between the vital and the abstract.”2 He chose his terms purposely: a nexus refers to neither a conciliatory correspondence nor a fully established identity; it names a relation of resonance sensed between dissimilar fields. As mentioned, drawing that relation involved catching sight of the world’s vital rhythms through constructive rules or principles. Yet abstract rules, however absolute, were not to be applied from the standpoint of a detached “intelligence.” Instead, life’s pulse had to be felt by way of an intuitive “consciousness of the real,”3 as emblematized by the glyph-like inscriptions which the artist started using in 1929. 11

Ideogram #42, 2014

Ideogram #10 (Tectonic), 2014

Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 14 in. 43,2 x 35,5 cm.

Mixed media collage on paper 81/8 x 111/8 in. 20,6 x 28,3 cm.

Sur, 2014 Oil on canvas 48 x 48 in. 121,9 x 121,9 cm.

Drawn according to proportions dictated by the golden section —the artist’s chief abstract principle—such inscriptions signal logic’s embedment in life. For they are vital yet schematic; instinctive and nonetheless structural; loosely traced, but placed across the geometric spread of the underlying grid, within the “measurable space of construction” and its “abstract logic.”4 From that site, the inscriptions read like pictograms, tracing as they do a reductive reference to things-in-the-world. It would be more appropriate, however, to call them ideograms: the ciphers of such ideas as measure, equilibrium or proportion. And to the extent that a new reality, according to Torres-García, would stem from the structured space of his art, the schemata function as the ideograms of a place to be constructed—a place yet to come. 2 Here the place in question is the sixth-floor loft of a cast-iron building constructed, in the 1850s, just south of Houston Street. Since 1993, the gallery Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., has used it to showcase historical and contemporary works from or related to the School of the South: Torres-García, Amalia Nieto, César Paternosto and Jesús Matheus, the exhibiting artist, to provide just an instance of a genealogical sequence that might include other names and different connections. The loft’s space is columnar: resting on wooden posts, the length of a thick lintel cuts across the entire area of exhibition. The site is, therefore, sequential: the succession of columns marks the progress of the viewer, thus making perception into a punctuated experience. The place, most remarkably, is a frame, as the flat arches of its post-and-lintel structure enclose our visual encounter with the exhibited art.

Joaquín Torres-García (1930) “The Will to Construct,” in Ramírez, Joaquín Torres-García, p. 38; and Historia de mi vida (Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1939), p. 79. 4

The works on view, by contrast, appear to have been deprived of a frame—not because they lack an encasing border, but on account of strategies that Matheus has used throughout. In Estela, for instance, the white band that extends across the picture’s lower edge disrupts the tight arrangement of shapes through which the extruding, flaring presence of a yellow rectangle is subdued and recontained. The band

Estela, 2014 Oil on canvas 56 x 50 in. 142,2 x 127 cm.

Cantos, 2014 Oil on canvas 36 x 485/8 in. 91,4 x 123,5 cm.

Ideogram #38 (Tectonic), 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 111/8 x 11他 in. 28,3 x 29,8 cm.

Ideogram #20, 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 13 x 10 in. 33 x 25,5 cm

Ideogram/Place, 2014 Oil on canvas 68 x 58 in. 170,7 x 147,3 cm.

slashes the work open, exposing it to its surroundings and reinforcing the resonance between this picture and the next —The Sentinel, a painting where the visual rest of a black-and-white composition is also deranged, this time by a vertical stretch of green. Other, more structural relations—such as the link between wooden planks, also hanging on the walls, and the elongated planes that run along each painting’s borders—divert the viewer’s attention from the works as isolated units to the space that lies between them. That space allows for different, when not contradictory definitions. One might call it abstract, since it is purely relational—disengaged, that is, from a graspable reality. Yet, as noted, the exhibition site’s columnar structure frames our grasp of such abstract relations. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the case of Pizarras, a triptych whose monochrome panels have been conjoined by narrow pieces of timber. As the work hangs encased within the span of a flat arch, the outside pair of columns looks like iterations of its internal shafts. And given that the monochrome marked painting’s topmost degree of autonomy—the moment when the pictorial work closed in on itself, utterly refusing to represent—the triptych’s prolongation into actual space appears like the interruption of the medium’s self-enclosure. It demarcates a boundary line beyond which abstract form becomes a place.

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “Dialogues. Extraits,” Philosophie Magazine (July/August 2012) 61, pp. 2–15. 5

3 Gilles Deleuze has claimed that one should think of becoming —or les devenirs, as he puts it to remark on the plurality of the event—in the terms of geography rather than in those of history. “Becomings are orientations, directions, entries and exits.” They are a net of recompositions instead of a linear sequence. Centrally, they involve a process of “double capture”: as a thing turns into another, that other which it becomes is equally transformed.5 As abstract form, then, becomes a place, the concept of place shifts just as much. And the encounter between the two terms of this relation is never fully achieved—it marks a precarious juncture, a provisory nexus rather than an assimilation, a resonance heard across fields that remain dissimilar. 19

Ideogram #43, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 11 in. 43,2 x 28 cm.

Prologue, 2014 Oil on canvas 12¼ x 12¼ in. 31,1 x 31,1 cm.

Ideogram #39, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 11 x 17 in. 28 x 43,2 cm.

In consonance with these ideas, “The Ideogram of Place” proposes to address what has been called site specificity from a new angle.6 For neither the exhibition’s nor the artist’s intent is to make art adhere to the specific traits of a site. The purpose is quite another: to construct the notion of another place for the perception of form—a place forged midway between the self-enclosure of the aesthetic medium and its exposure to what lies beyond the medium’s notional frame.

On site specificity and its contemporary discursive iterations, see Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October (Spring 1997): 85–110. 7 See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 276–290; and “A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition” (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 8 For a detailed account of the artist’s work, especially as regards its transformative dialogue with the legacy of Torres-García’s work, see the chronology at the end of this catalogue. 9 Joaquín Torres-García (1941), Universalismo constructivo (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984), p. 731. 6

The exhibition does not seek, therefore, to step outside either the sculptural or pictorial mediums or to divert them within an expanded field.7 Here the subject of expansion is the ideogram itself—the goal being to produce signs that point at both the autonomous site of abstraction and the actual site from which abstract form is perceived. Such signs, moreover, are not inscribed within the self-enclosed construction of either painting or sculpture, as inscribed ciphers to be read; they become operative, and therefore legible, at the juncture between place and form—at the point where the structure of one term is made part of the construction of the other. The relation is reversible. It is reenacted throughout the exhibition as a net of “orientations, directions, entries and exits” across space. Yet, though the installation is more concerned with marking off a perceptual territory than tracing a historical reading, it does point back at the ideogrammatic construction of Torres-García’s work, which Matheus engages anew and develops otherwise.8 The artist’s engagement with a regional past is not only formal; it also follows a conceptual thread. For Torres-García’s ideograms meant to displace Latin America’s entrenched narratives—indigenismo being one of them—as these were written and administered by the institutions of power. And it seems equally important, now that other narratives are being enforced, to provide a point of view from which ruled notions of what should define a Latin American place might be suspended—a point of view, to quote Torres-García, from which the artist might “create negatively” and in the process arrive at “another dimension of things, another proportion, another structural coordination”9 —an alternate ideogram of place.

The Sentinel, 2014 Acrylic and oil on canvas 42 x 32 in. 106 x 81,2 cm.

Notebook(Set of 4), 2014 Oil on canvas, painted wood Each 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 27,9 cm.

Section I, 2014 Stained wood 12 Â˝ x 5 x 2 in. 32,4 x 12,7 x 5 cm.

Tectonic II, 2014

Ideogram II, 2014

Stained wood 513/16 x 513/16 x 3 in. 14,7 x 14,7 x 7,6 cm.

Stained wood 155/8 x 41/8 x 13/4 in. 39,6 x 10,8 x 4,4 cm.

Ideogram, 2014 Stained wood 25/8 x 195/8 x 2 in. 6,6 x 49,7 x 5 cm.

Tectonic I, 2014 Stained wood 6 x 6 x 25/8 in. 15,2 x 15,2 x 6,6 cm.

Pizarras, 2014 Oil on canvas and painted wood Each 48 x 44 in. 121,9 x 111,7 cm.

Madera 3, 2014 Mixed media on assemblage wood 175/8 x 61 x 2 in. 44.7 x 154,9 x 5,2 cm.

Madera 1, 2014

Madera 2, 2014

Mixed media on assemblage wood 633/8 x 91/8 x 13/8 in. 161 x 23,2 x 3,5 cm.

Mixed media on assemblage wood 461/8 x 91/8 x 21/8 in. 117 x 23,2 x 5,4 cm.

Ideogram #54, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Ideogram #26, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 9 x 12 in. 22,8 x 30,5 cm.

Ideogram #45, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 11 x 14 in. 28 x 35,5 cm.

Study for a Painting (Ideogram/Place), 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 10 x 7他 in. 25 x 19,8 cm.

Two squares over step, 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 57/8 x 57/8 in. 12,5 x 12,5 cm.

Ideogram #51, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Ideogram #33, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 175/8 x 141/8 in. 44,8 x 35,9 cm.

Ideogram #48, 2014

Ideogram #35 (Study for painting), 2013

Mixed media assemblage on paper 11 x 14 in. 28 x 35,5 cm.

Mixed media assemblage on paper 9 x 12 in. 22,8 x 30,5 cm.

Ideogram#52, 2014

Ideogram #55, 2014

Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Ideogram #44, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 11 in. 43,2 x 28 cm.

Ideogram #41, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 11 in. 43,2 x 28 cm.

Notebook suite #4, 2013

Ideogram #53, 2014

Mixed media assemblage on paper 67/8 x 47/8 in. 17,5 x 12,5 cm.

Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Ideogram #56, 2014

Ideogram#28, 2014

Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 14 in. 43,2 x 35,5 cm.

Mixed media assemblage on paper 12 x 9 in. 30,5 x 22,8 cm.

Ideogram #34, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 173/4 x 141/8 in. 44,8 x 35,9 cm.

Retrospective Survey

Tectonic, 2013 Oil on canvas and wood 261/2 x 24 x 1 in. 67,3 x 61 X 2,5 cm.

Jesús Matheus

Form as Place as Form Pictography: expression and communication by means of pictures and drawings [characterized] by stereotyped execution and by omission of all details not necessary for the expression of the communication. A pictograph that stands for an individual idea or meaning may be called an ideogram; if a pictograph stands for an individual word, it is called a logogram. The editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I am interested in a process of intermediation, in the admixture of media and the possibility of shaping their mutual resonances. What guides that process is a will to construct. Form takes root in those intermediary relations: form as the conceptual development of a tectonic sensation; form as the presentness of an object that migrates from one medium to the other. In each stage of my work I have searched for that object, the place of which cannot be framed within a medium-specific site. Detached from a concrete object, such a place is to be found between the works as a concept or idea in development. It is an ideogrammatic construction. Tectonics The notion of “emotional architecture”—the phrase was used by Mathias Goeritz in relation to his work—informs my constructions: the connection of shapes, understood and created as sensitized places, within a material totality. In my case construction is programmatic. It is ruled by a system, a logic applied to the tectonic interpretation of forms. Such a system has changed throughout my work, inflected by new foci of interest and each time redefined by preliminary manifestoes. Yet every manifesto is fundamental and my series are open-ended. They overlap one another.

Steles My interest is in the configurative force of visual principles —the production of sensations, material memories and forms of relation—that link to a physical place. This translates into a mode of constructivism: a constructive manner of making the artwork concrete. Framed within this sensitive and sensitized space, thresholds and other architectonic notions define places where a programmatic geometry signals at forms and parts that are built. A Gestalt, then, begins to emerge: a Gestalt under construction. Squares The strict structure of the square confronts me as a totemic presence. Yet the term “totem” should not be misunderstood as a magical invocation—I use it to name the visual force of a hieratic shape, the transgression of which appears to me like a formal taboo. And yet I transgress: the exact encounter between height and width frames the serial development of pictorial events that conjure other scales and dimensions where color takes root. The whole process amounts to the intuitive grasp, through color, of a rational dictum. Thereby the square becomes an impossible place: intuitive yet rational, endless yet finite, at once serial and unique. The White Studio At first the sculptures of an engraver—the prolongation of etched sign-forms into actual space—the white blocks took on a new dimension that exceeded space itself: they became a continuum, a concatenated totality. These forms began to recreate the space they occupy and in that process created themselves anew. Their whiteness confronts the viewer with a silent conundrum that prompts the associations of memory: place, site, ceremonial sign or mark. They stand as minimal three-dimensional gestures that suffice to keep an idea alive—an idea that might be as simple yet also complex as the relations of parts within a whole.

Bolts, Echoes and Stepped Forms Form is substance, a substantive invention. To this paraphrase of Octavio Paz I would add a postscript: all materiality dissolves into form, which is to say a schema—always tectonic, in my work—of its corporeal density. The bolts, echoes and stepped forms with which I began making abstraction are just such substantive schemas. They rise as the always fractional and fractured dialogue between abstraction and its concrete, material embedment. Growing out of the lanceolate gestures of my earlier work, these forms take on the task of transfixing the space in which they stand, or splintering the plane on which they rest, only to have their shapes fractured by the emptiness of either actual space or the paper’s background. This takes place along a gradual process—a back-and-forth motion between the schematic and the material components of form’s development. The described process not only takes place; it makes place. And it is from that realization that I proceeded to produce the work illustrated in the following sections, all the way forward to its ideogrammatic resolution.

Tectonics 2014 - 2012

Constructivo, 2014

Forma/Trazo, 2014

Intaglio 67/8 x 61/4 in. 17,5 x 15,7 cm.

Intaglio 61/4 x 67/8 in. 15,7 x 17,5 cm.

Lineal Constructivo III, 2014 Intaglio 8 x 85/8 in. 20,4 x 22 cm.

Lineal Constructivo II, 2014 Intaglio 93/4 x 93/4 in. 24,8 x 24,8 cm.

Orthogonal #1, 2014

Orthogonal #2, 2014

Intaglio 4 x 27/8 in. 20,2 x 4,7 cm.

Lineal Constructivo, 2014 Intaglio 45/8 x 41/2 in. 11 x 11,5 cm.

Ortogonal, 2014 Intaglio 4 x 27/8 in. 20,2 x 4,7 cm.

FormaTecton, 2014 Oil on canvas Each 82 x 36 in. 208 x 91,4 cm.

Steles 2013 - 2010

Estelita, 2010 Painted wood 12 x 7 x 5 in. 30,5 x 17,7 x 12,7 cm.

Azul Hendido, 2010 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in. 152,4 x 182,8 cm.

Estela 1A, 2013 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. 152,4 x 152,4 cm.

Estela Rose Noir, 2013 Oil on canvas 54 x 54 in. 137 x 137 cm.

La forma es lugar, 2013

Uno, 2012

Acrylic on canvas 541/2 x 541/2 in. 138,4 x 138,4 cm.

Acrylic and oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. 152,4 x 152,4 cm.

Matinal, 2010

Relieve Constructivo, 2017

Oil on canvas 64 x 64 in. 162,5 x 162,5 cm.

Painted wood 13 x 11 x 11/2 in. 33 x 28 x 3,8 cm.

Squares 2014 - 2008

JesĂşs Matheusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio in Boston, Massachusetts, 2010. 60

Ideogram #31, (Urdimbre) 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 133/4 x 111/8 in. 35 x 28,3 cm.

Ideogram #36, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 11 x 17 in. 28 x 43,2 cm.

Ortogonal, 2014

Continuum, 2008 (first version)

Intaglio 4 x 27/8 in. 20,2 x 4,7 cm.

Oil on canvas Each 10 x 10 in. 25,4 x 25,4 cm.

Muralito, 2012 (set of 4)

Acequia, 2008

Oil on canvas Each 18 x 18 in. 45,7 x 45,7 cm.

Oil on canvas Each 12 x 12 in. 30,5 x 30,5 cm.

VacĂos, 2007 Oil on canvas 22 x 22 in. 55,8 x 55,8 cm.

Untitled, Serie Calados, 2014 Intaglio 11 x 11 in. 28 x 28 cm.

Untitled, 2006 Oil on canvas 10 x 10 in. 25,4 x 25,4 cm.

The White Studio 2008

Friso, 2008 Stained wood 16 x 5 x 2 in. 40,6 x 12,7 x 5 cm.

Columna, 2008 Stained wood 6 x 18 x 2 in. 15,2 x 45,7 x 5 cm.

Installation view of JesĂşs Matheusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Visual/Manual exhibition at the Center for Latino Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, 2008 70

Bolts, Echoes and Stepped Forms. 2008 - 2002

Rayo de Luz 1, 2006

Rayo de Luz 2, 2006

Oil on canvas 18 x 24 in. 45,7 x 61 cm.

Navajo 2, 2006 Oil on canvas Each 17 x 14 in. 43,2 x 35,6 cm.

Quartet Series II, 2009 Woodcut Each 12 x 9 in. 30,5 x 23 cm.

Chronology Jesús Matheus was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1957. He studied at the Escola de Belas Artes, Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1981)

which he has maintained throughout his production. Also in Rio, Matheus came into contact with pre-Columbian imagery, the schematic construction

and graduated from the Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica, Caracas (1987). From 1992 to 1999 and in 2003, Matheus taught printmaking and drawing at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, now Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Artes (Caracas), from which he also obtained a BFA degree with the thesis “Visual/ Manual. A Mode of Making in the Visual Arts” (2012). He has lived in Boston, Massachusetts, since 2005.

of which he used in the creation of small synthetic figures. Following expeditions to prehispanic archaeological sites in Bolivia, Perú, Ecuador and Colombia, the artist decided to continue what became a long-held inquiry into the tectonic character of Amerindian stonework and weaving. The influence of the Amerindian paradigm is discernible in the period’s engravings, which emphasize the structural inscription of repeated figures in grid-like arrangements. Universalismo Constructivo, the collection of writings by Uruguayan artist Joaquín TorresGarcía (1874–1949), provided the conceptual ground for these early works. The book has remained a fundamental point of reference and a guide in the artist’s progressive adoption of abstraction.

During his stay in Rio de Janeiro (1976–1981), Matheus continued a line of work he had begun in Caracas: a set of landscapes, made up of separate brushmarks, which he called “notations.” These inaugural works already reveal the artist’s interest in serial structures,

In 1987, having returned to Caracas and further trained as a graphic artist, Matheus began combining separate silkscreens stamped with pre-Columbian motifs into sequential sets. He ascribed a votive character to these arrangements, which he conceived as altars. The writings of Mircea Eliade and especially the theory of Claude Levi-Strauss marked this period: resorting to the serial repetition of figures, the artist used mythic imagery as structural components of increasingly complex forms. Beginning in 1991, a strong interest in syncretism—the conjunction of different religious beliefs into one cult, so typical of Latin America—led him to treat the plane of each image as a “time of encounters.” The phrase appears in the title of a critical account of the artist’s production, written by Élida Salazar. She elaborates, in a text that accompanied the solo exhibition Novísimas Imaginerías (Most Recent Imageries; México City, 1992): “the use of a figurative language, the recourse to prehispanic and colonial forms extracted from markedly different 78

latitudes and bearing a Latin American content [allows the artist to go beyond] the local theme, rendering it universal.” The syncretic element also found a technical translation, as Xeroxes and typographic characters were included in photo-etching matrixes—the means to what critic Carlos Palacios called “appropriation”: rather than engaging in the interpretation of cultural remnants, Matheus performed as both cartographer and archivist, much in the manner of the region’s colonial cronistas. He called these works “text-images.” Hosted in 1993 by the art foundation Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba, the exhibition Plaza Mayor (Main Square) gathered these multiple references to “ancient rediscoveries and a dramatic present,” as the artist wrote in the show’s flyer.

Also in the late 1980s, Matheus started painting. At first gestural compositions influenced by the work of Wifredo Lam, his pictures took on a more synthetic character. They eventually became as streamlined as pictographs—each of them signaling “the presence,” as he then put it, “of abstract synthesis.” House of Signs, an exhibition that opened in Galería Leo Blasini, Caracas, in 1997, gathered what Matheus described as “crosses and Ts, inverted and repeated, placed in different positions or site(s), pectorals or dual marks, icons and fretworks, steps of a great pyramid that occupy the plane and make up a spatial symbology of sorts.” The artist’s interest in lending his works a space of their own—not just symbolic, but actual—led to the production of “graphic installations,” such as Memoria de los Muertos. Tiempo Mágico (Memory of the Dead. Magical Time), shown at Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco (México City, 1996) and the Museo de las Américas (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998).

In both venues, a large amount of the same etched image covered entire walls. Thereby the artist’s work took on the collective character of murals; a condition he related to the fact that, as appropriations of past imageries, they were the production of “collective hands.” Matheus remarked on the idea that these “walls of offerings,” were altars—yet, rather than devoted to a numinous idea, the murals opened a space for the contemplation of an “eroded memory.” In 1999, such an attempt at recovering a cancelled past acquired an unprecedented dimension: in Imaginería Nómada (Nomadic Imagery)—an exhibition mounted at the Sala Mendoza, a renowned experimental gallery in Caracas—piles of etchings, incised wooden blocks, books and other types of written material combined to create a complex “space and time.” Revolving around the central idea of making a syncretic whole out of past and present references, the temporal space in question was compared by the artist to the swirling rings of a snail’s shell.

In titling his work “nomadic,” Matheus presciently named the state that would define the next period of his life, as political circumstances determined a voluntary exile. In 1999 the artist moved to New Mexico, where he stayed for one year so as to explore ancestral Pueblo and Navajo culture. His graphic production became even more schematic, with a distinct emphasis on the frontal disposition of Nahuatl glyphs. Fossil, a work dated in 2000, marked a turning point: the strict frontality of the torqued black shape arrests the gaze of the viewer, who is

at the same time prompted to perceive the surrounding white area as either figure or ground. Thus, according to the artist’s terms, the image takes on the condition of the totem (i.e., upright, arresting and fixed), while opening up to perceptual ambivalence. Those two factors—totemism and visual ambiguity—will inform his subsequent production. So will the reduction of the figure to a glyph, a pictographic inscription that in Fossil stands for a deer’s antlers: it is by way of the pictograph’s reductiveness that Matheus fully embraced abstraction.

Matheus moved in 2000 to Boston, where he would live for three years. In 2002, the artist exhibited his work in individual shows titled Paintings and The Skin of Painting (Gómez Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland; and Solar Gallery, East Hampton, New York). That same year, before returning to Caracas in order to pursue an advanced degree in art, he reconnected with Cecilia de Torres, the leading scholar on the work of Joaquín Torres-García, whom he had met in Venezuela in the late 1990s. The encounter allowed him a better grasp of the School of the South, the production of which has found a site of exhibition and discussion at Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., New York. Also in 2002, yet another encounter markedly influenced the artist’s work: George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) proved a fundamental source of ideas as Matheus adopted an entirely abstract idiom in the same year. Thus, the notions of order, classification and variation —all explored in Kubler’s book— informed the three series with which he bade farewell to the figure in order to engage both in the production of planar geometric shapes and the construction of things: despite their residual iconic

character, as conveyed by their titles, “Bolts,” “Echoes,” and “Stepped Forms” explored the possibility to shape, by means of the formulation of constructive methods, the time through which pure form develops. That is especially the case with the artist’s volumes: all-white, each of them is a fractional element of a larger objective system—they are “unclassifiable things,” to use a term of Torres-García, that belong to a formal continuum. In 2008, three years after returning to Boston, the artist made such an intent clear by recreating and gathering them in a shifting installation which he called “The White Studio” and exhibited in his third individual show in the United States (Visual/Manual, Center for Latino Arts, Boston). A “volatile order” was thereby produced, as the architecture historian Guillermo Barrios wrote at the time on the artist’s work in general: “a spectrum of [constructive] options” underlain by “deep codes, primary structures, series and geometric taxonomies.” The artist exhibited such constructions in Caracas (Artepuy, 2008), where local news papers remarked on his shift to full-blown abstraction and what could be called a laboratory architecture: “Matheus returns extrapictorial and geometric,” read the headline of one review. 81

Matheus simultaneously adopted a stringent format that allowed him further to explore the notion of totemic structures: the series of “Squares,” begun in 2008, testify to his double engagement with, on the one hand, a rational stricture (i.e., the proportional equilibrium of the quadrilateral shape) and, on the other, an intuitive approach to the limits that such a stricture imposes on the generation of alternate forms. Matheus became interested in inflecting formal reason, yet within the limits of rationality itself. This he did through an

intensive use of color, the layers of which pile up on the plane as strata bearing witness to the progressive “history of the thing,” to use Kubler’s expression— a thing that, in this case, is the constructed picture. Other questions raised by Kubler fueled the artist’s creative process, both in the series of “Squares” and the subsequent one, which he called “Steles” and began in 2010: To what extent is a series infinite? What prevents the square from becoming a dogma; a system from turning into a rigid order?

In 2013, the exhibitions Square/Totem (Ideobox, Miami) and The Restive Square (Artepuy, Caracas) remarked on the ways in which such questions about formative systems were also key to the artist’s thinking about the place in which different forms, formats and mediums coexist. Matheus is currently experimenting with the prolongation of painting into sculpture and exploring the extent to which such a prolongation demarcates a site, a place that belongs in neither discipline. In that mediatory realm, another system—other rules and guides of classification—begins to operate in the production of aesthetic space. There are three ways in which he has approached the place inquestion: through the interlocking shapes of his

“Tectonics” series, begun in 2012; by way of installations in which plane and volume resonate with each other; and through pictographs in which the trace of detached tapes marks the boundaries of a conjured territory. These three options converge in The Ideogram of Place, an exhibition that opened on October 9, 2014, at Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.—only that there the space of exhibition intruded the structure of the works themselves, constructing a site that is both aesthetic and actual; while the works on display projected back onto the viewer’s location a place that is neither visual nor habitable. That place is, as the artist has stated, an ideogrammatic construction.

Collections and Past Exhibitions Collections Bob Blackburn New York Printmaking Workshop, New York Dana Faber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts Cisneros Foundation, Caracas, Venezuela Cabinet of Print and Drawing, National Gallery of Art, Caracas, Venezula Carlos Cruz-Diez Museum of Illustration and Design, Caracas, Venezuela Mario Abreu Museum of Contemporary Art, Maracay, Venezuela National Library, Caracas, Venezuela Taller de Artistas Gráficos Asociados, Caracas, Venezuela Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana, Venezuela Mercantil Bank Foundation, Caracas, Venezuela National Museum of Print, México City, México Embassy of Venezuela, México City, México Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, México Wilfredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba René Portocarrero Silk Screen Workshop, Havana, Cuba Embassy of Venezuela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, School of Fine Arts, Brazil Federal University of Espiritu Santo, Vitoria, Brazil Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Past Exhibitions 2014 The Ideogram of Place, Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., New York 2013 Recent Works by Gallery Artists, Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., New York

Time Pieces (two person show w/Danielle Sauvé), gallery@ARTBLOCK, Boston, Massachusetts Square Totem/recent work, Ideobox Artspace, Miami, Florida

The Restless Square, Artepuy Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela

2012 2D Salon, Chandler Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Línea Crítica/Desplazamientos Cromáticos, Artepuy Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela

Magic Square, Artkitec Gallery, Mérida, Venezuela

2011 Jesús Matheus: New work, Solar Gallery, East Hampton, New York 2010 Variable Dimensions, (two person show), AIB/ Lesley University, University Hall Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2008 Recent work, Artepuy Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela

Visual/Manual Center for Latino Arts CLA, Boston, Massachusetts

2006 PureForm Paintings, Solar Gallery, East Hampton, New York 2005 Unseen paintings, Diversity Gallery, QCC Community College, Worcester, Massachusetts

Trashumantes Paintings and Drawings, Pages Espai d’art, Barcelona, Spain

2002 Paintings, Gomez Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland

The Skin of the Painting, Solar Gallery, East Hampton, New York

2001 Site B Works on Paper, Open studios FPCA, Boston, Massachusetts 1999 Nómada/Nomad Installations, Sala Mendoza Gallery, Caracas, Venezuela 1998 Print Installations, Museum of Americas, San Juan, Puerto Rico

In Situ Installations and Artist Books, Unus Space, Caracas, Venezuela

Exhibition Works Altarpiece, 2014 Acrilyc and oil on canvas, painted wood 73 x 85 x 4 in. 185,4 x 215,9 x 10,1 cm. Altar T, 2014 Oil on canvas and painted wood 71 x 48 x 11/2 in. 180,3 x 121,9 x 3,8 cm. Cantos, 2014 Acrylic and oil on canvas 36 x 485/8 in. 91,4 x 123,5 cm. Eco, 2014 Stained wood 34 x 31/2 x 4 in. 86,4 x 8,9 x 10,1 cm. Estela, 2014 Oil and mixed media on canvas 56 x 50 in. 142,2 x 127 cm. Ideogram, 2014 Stained wood 25/8 x 195/8 x 2 in. 6,6 x 49,7 x 5 cm. Ideogram/Form, 2014 Acrylic and oil on canvas 60 x 60 in. 152,4 X 152,4 cm. Ideogram/Place, 2014 Oil on canvas 68 x 58 in. 170,7 x 147,3 cm. Ideogram #10, 2014 Mixed media collage on paper 81/8 x 111/8 in. 20,6 x 28,3 cm. Ideogram #20, 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 13 x 10 in. 33 x 25,5 cm. Ideogram #33, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 175/8 x 141/8 in. 44,8 x 35,9 cm. Ideogram #34, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 173/4 x 141/8 in. 45 x 35,9 cm. 86

Ideogram #38 (Tectonic), 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 111/8 x 113/4 in. 28,3 x 29,8 cm.

Madera 3, 2014 Mixed media on assemblage wood 175/8 x 61 x 2 in. 44,7 x 154,9 x 5,2 cm

Ideogram #41, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 11 in. 43,2 x 28 in.

Notebook (Set of 4), 2014 Oil on canvas and painted wood Each 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 27,9 cm.

Ideogram #42, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 14 in. 43,2 x 35,5 cm.

Pizarras, 2014 Oil on canvas and painted wood Each 48 x 44 in. 121,9 x 111,7 cm.

Ideogram #43, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 17 x 11 in. 43,2 x 28 cm.

Section I, 2014 Stained wood 12½ x 5 x 2 in. 32,4 x 12,7 x 5 cm.

Ideogram #45, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 11 x 14 in. 28 x 35,5 cm.

Study for a Painting (Ideogram/Form), 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 7¾ x 8 in. 19,8 x 20 cm.

Ideogram #51, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Study for a Painting (Ideogram/Place), 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 10 x 7¾ in. 25 x 19,8 cm.

Ideogram#52, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Sur, 2014 Acrylic and oil on canvas 48 x 48 in. 121,9 x 121,9 cm.

Ideogram #54, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on paper 14 x 11 in. 35,5 x 28 cm.

Tectonic I, 2014 Stained wood 6 x 6 x 25/8 in. 15,2 x 15,2 x 6,6 cm.

Lugares (estudio para Pintura), 2013 Mixed media assemblage on wood Each 6¼ x 5½ in. 15,7 x 14 cm.

Tectonic II, 2014 Stained wood 513/16 x 513/16 x 3 in. 14,7 x 14,7 x 7,6 cm.

Madera 1, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on wood 633/8 x 91/8 x 13/8 in. 161 x 23,2 x 3,5 cm

The Sentinel, 2014 Oil and mixed media on canvas 42 x 32 in. 106 x 81,2 cm.

Madera 2, 2014 Mixed media assemblage on wood 461/8 x 91/8 x 21/8 in. 117 x 23,2 x 5,4 cm

Two squares over step, 2013 Mixed media assemblage on paper 57/8 x 57/8 in. 12,5 x 12,5 cm. 87

ÂŠ CECILIA DE TORRES, LTD. New York, 2014 Director

Dan Pollock Assisted by

Melanie Breitman Susanna Temkin Curated by

Juan Ledezma Photography by

Marisol Marquez Arturo Sanchez Design

Pedro Mancilla Printed by

Coral Graphics ISBN 978-0-9913024-1-3

134-140 GREENE STREET NEW YORK, NY 10012 T. 212-431-5869/ F. 212-343-0235

mail@ceciliadetorres.com www.ceciliadetorres.com

CECILIA DE TORRES, LTD. 134-140 GREENE ST., NEW YORK, NY 10012 MAIL@CECILIADETORRES.COM/WWW.CECILIADETORRES.COM