Nicolás LEIVA
Infinite Cycle
Paintings and Drawings Southwest School of Art May 9 – July 6, 2014
Infinite Cycle Under Fire Ceramic Works
Ruiz-Healy Art May 9 – July 6, 2014
FOREWORD Paula Owen President, Southwest School of Art
For many years I admired the unusual works by Nicolás Leiva in Patricia RuizHealy’s galleries. A few of them had worked their way into my mind so powerfully that I had a strong desire to see more and began talking to Patricia about a major exhibition at the Southwest School of Art. A visit to Leiva’s studio in Miami reinforced this notion. Although already drawn to his work, talking to him about the stories embedded in them, revealed several additional layers of intensity. Leiva presents us with archetypal dreamscapes which explore the origins of personal identity. These works depict fantastical other worlds employing exuberant color intensified by narrative detail, yet their aim is to uncover the tension between earthly forces: life and death, suffering and pleasure, dream and reality. His are scenes, both whimsical and menacing, in which landscape and architecture borrow elements inherent to each — trees and gardens become urban in complexity, expansive structures for transformation and habitation, while buildings and cities acquire the flux and breadth of entire ecosystems or galaxies. To experience Nicolás Leiva’s ideas and stories takes us out of our day-to-day mind-set, reminding us that there are myriad ways to be in the world. We are immensely grateful to him for sharing his world with us.
Nicolás LEVIA Infinite Cycle 2
Untitled 3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We gratefully acknowledge the generous sponsors of this catalog: Argo Group and South Texas Money Management. We are also most grateful to Patricia Ruiz-Healy and Ruiz-Healy Art for assistance in organizing this exhibition and catalog.
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WORKS ON WOOD AND CANVAS
Triptych 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 5
1+1+1=3 6
ESSAY by Scott Andrews
“I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you” Paul Cézanne wrote to his friend and painting companion Émile Bernard in a letter dated October 23, 1905. It was the last year of Cézanne’s life, and the beginning of the modern era. In the century since, many art currents have swirled around the question underlying Cézanne’s statement: Is the role of painting to picture the world truly, or to reveal its own truth to the world? Through painting, drawing, ceramic works, and a host of other media, Nicolás Leiva presents an ethereal world that is true to a mystic vision, and sustained by a material practice delighting in sensuality. Elaborate, stylized tableaux of oneiric scenes filled with an effulgence of idiosyncratic ornament and symbols embellish his canvases; his ceramics are glazed in bright colors, gilded, and embossed with silver. In explaining his practice, Leiva declares, “It is a street that takes you to the mystic elevation. You pray, you work. It is the same.” Nicolás Leiva Infinite Cycle presents a selection of his drawings and paintings from 2000-2013. A companion exhibition at Ruiz-Healy Art is comprised of works in ceramic. Born in 1958, in Tucumán, in northwest Argentina, Leiva graduated from the arts faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. He continued his studies in Buenos Aires, and moved to Miami in 1990. Solely a painter until 1996, when he extended his practice to sculpture, Leiva now also lives part-time in Faenza, Italy, where he produces his ceramics at the studios of Bottega Gatti.
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The Cuban-American poet and critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa has written that, “In his generation in Argentina, Leiva has no equal in sheer originality and power, and few rivals in Latin America or elsewhere,” and likens his drive to expand the theatre of his visual poetics — and its basis on the dream world of the baroque — to the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and the poetry of Octavio Paz. Though his work is often referred to as dream-like and surrealist, Leiva is an exemplar of Latin Neobaroque art practice. Missing are surrealism’s tendencies to dwell on accident and entropy, replaced by a purposeful array of ordered design, yet eschewing symmetry for the swirling, organic patterning of arabesque. Drawing from the Spanish Baroque art and design work he was surrounded by as a child in Argentina, his highly elaborate scenes recall the votive paintings known as retablos, but are devoid of human presence like the static mise-en-scène of theater. As in classic baroque, Leiva’s works are filled with abundance surpassing nature. His gestures are personal, rather than historically derived, though in their often similarity to ideograms they recall Mayan and Aztec codices of Mesoamerica. An ecstatic dream world, perhaps, but certainly teeming with symbol. Obsessions with security — and its lack — are made evident by the many houses, boxes, boats, and walled ramparts that populate his scenes often simultaneously city, garden, water — and sky. Fantastic plants, star-like flying devices, and islands floating in water and air surge in a 2002 triptych, 1+1+1=3. Dark waters and two gargantuan boats menaced by clouds made of square funnels, figure in Oscuro y Verde Ajeno I, a large 2008 oil and charcoal work on canvas. But is this threat, or communication? The boats bristle with listening devices, and in the center distance, an elevated platform beyond the ships’ bows seems in conversation with the sky.
Nicolás LEVIA Essay 8
1+1+1=3 9
1+1+1=3 10
That many of Leiva’s graphic elements seem to recall symbols or signs is not happenstance. A reference sheet for Historia de Amor emblazoned with design elements found recurring in his works is a contemporary codex — a literal vocabulary. Next to elaborate motifs that appear solely ornamental, are notations: cielo con lluvio de amor sutil, (sky with subtle love rains), reads one; another is labelled cielo con amor celestial (sky with celestial love); while others mention an air strip, passionate water flowers; star that transmits amorous energy; and most interesting, next to two large and quite elaborate glyphs, El and Ella (Him and Her). Though appearing — aside from the recognizable boats, dwellings, roads, rivers and sky — to consist of geometric- and organic-based ornament, Leiva’s pieces are charged with animal spirit, the skies dripping with sensuality. A massive painting, Sala da Pranzo, 2011, spans over 24 feet long in canvas covered with lush colors, and adds human heads in majolica and gold. The attached heads are lifelike, and inverting Lieva’s vocabulary of symbolic glyphs, serve as ornament. The vibrant palette and presence of three-dimensional elements make this a gateway piece to Leiva’s ceramic works, which sometimes also have cast-body elements. However, most often, the ceramic works realize in three dimensions the symbolic forms found in the twodimensional works. The ceramics are formed in geometries, such as discs or orbs, but more often take on the shapes of the symbolic glyphs found in the paintings and drawings. Flowers are a recurring theme, and are seen at the exhibition at Ruiz-Healy Art in a large installation of a dozen-plus individual works, The Gardens of Babylon. Transposed to clay, the figures inhabiting Leiva’ oneiric realm are revealed in bright, primary colors emblazoned with metal. Animal and vegetable commingle in a garden of flowers sporting human heads turned skyward like sunflowers; places of shelter are replicated as box-like reliquaries, and Nicolás LEVIA Essay 11
plate-like medallions picture in miniature closeup views of territories seen in the twodimensional works. Like a Klein bottle, or a Mobius strip, Leiva’s imaginative world folds in on itself in seeming paradox, containing infinite realms within its many centers. Like the marks in his drawings and paintings, the ceramic pieces are highly gestural, recalling the strokes of writing as much as forms organic and geometric. Though language is invoked, this is presentation, not description. As Pau-Llosa has it, Leiva presents a host of archetypes in his emblems of flight, safety, and mixed delight — but this is theater, not story. Unabashedly lush in an almost unbearable display of plenitude, Leiva’s delight in visual sensuality is emphatic and immediate. Such abundance is often identified in the U.S. as a hallmark of the work of visionary artists who are compulsive, self-taught makers, rather than studied heirs to William Blake and Walt Whitman. In Leiva’s case, the artist is not only far from naive, but is pursuing a vision rather than compelled by one. Leiva has described his vision as that of his desired future — a realm on the other side of a line that he can only seldom cross. The artist is not his art, but — like a lover — his art is the object of desire, and the object is retinal, sensual — mystic, but sexual, too. Many of the ceramic pieces exist in double-vision; shaped like symbolic glyphs, and covered in bright, highly saturated colors and lined surface design that replicate patterns found in Leiva’s drawings and paintings. Or is the vocabulary of shapes that fills the paintings in abundance derived from the the earthenware forms? No matter. Whether swarming the skin of painting or pottery, or realized in the round — the glyphs are names, are shapes, are things and desire itself. Leiva tells us the truth in painting is the truth of a possible, wondrous, world. Nicolás LEVIA Essay 12
Oscuro y Verde Ajeno I 13
Oscuro y Verde Ajeno II 14
Oscuro y Verde Ajeno III 15
WORKS ON PAPER
Series of five Historia de Amor 16
Series of five Historia de Amor 17
A la Sombra de Mi Memoria 18
Un Dia Normal de mi Vida 19
Miren lo que Estoy Sintiendo 20
Bajo mi Casa hay Ideas Extranas 21
Untitled 22
Puente, Casa, Nave 23
Ensayo II 24
Ensayo IV 25
Exhibition Checklist Gallery I Oscuro y Verde Ajeno III 2008 oil, charcoal on canvas 108 x 132 inches
Untitled 2001 oil on wood 28 x 35 inches 1+ 1 + 1 = 3 2002 oil on wood 79 x 79 inches each panel, triptych Oscuro y Verde Ajeno I 2008 oil, charcoal on canvas 108 x 132 inches
Sala da Pranzo 2011 acrylic on canvas with heads in majolica and gold 72 x 288 inches
Oscuro y Verde Ajeno II 2008 oil, charcoal on canvas 108 x 132 inches Collection of Silvina Belmonte
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Exhibition Checklist Gallery II Ensayo II 2004 pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches
A la Sombra de Mi Memoria 2013 charcoal on paper 59.5 x 39.125 inches
Ensayo IV 2004 pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches
Bajo mi Casa hay Ideas Extranas 2013 charcoal on paper 39.5 x 59.5 inches
Puente, Casa, Nave 2005 pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches
Miren lo que Estoy Sintiendo 2013 charcoal on paper 39.5 x 59.5 inches
Historia de Amor 2009 pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches each
Un Dia Normal de mi Vida 2013 charcoal on paper 84 x 59.5 inches
Untitled 2011 pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches
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CERAMIC WORKS | Infinite Cycle Under Fire | Ruiz-Healy Art
Hands of Paradise | Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Mark Edmund Watson III 28
Under Fire III 29
Under Fire III 30
NICOLáS LEIVA Biography Born Tucumán, Argentina Resides Miami, FL
EDUCATION 1973 1978
School of Fine Arts, National University of Tucumán, Tucumán Argentina Faculty of Fine Arts, National University of Tucumán, Tucumán, Argentina
AWARDS RECEIVED 2000 1996 1992 1990
Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, Florida Department of State National Endowment for the Arts, Southern Arts Federation, Atlanta, GA South Florida Cultural Consortium, Miami, FL International Art Biennial, Valparaíso, Chile
MAJOR EXHIBITIONS
2013 2012 2011 2010
1st Bienal del Sur de Panamá, Panamá Group Show, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Aluna Art Foundation, Miami, FL Latin American Master Print, Central Library, San Antonio, TX Mistica y Color, Centro Federal de Inversiones, Buenos Aires, Argentina Casa Golinelli, Bologna, Italy Accent Experimental Space, Miami, FL My Paradise, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX Base Paint Project, Humanitarian project for Haiti, Florida International University Latin American Collection from Ricardo Pau Llosa, The Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN Base Paint Project, Art Basel, Miami, FL Self, Symbol and the Spirit, Art Rouge, Miami, FL Cartolina, Beijing International Biennial of Art, Beijing, China Stemperando, VI International Biennale of Paper, Spoleto, Italy L’Anima della Terra, Castellamonte, Italy Nicolás LEVIA Infinite Cycle 31
2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995
Quo Tendas, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX Heavenly Terrain, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX Quo Tendas, Bluedoor Fine Arts, Miami, FL Biennale di Sabbioneta, Palazzo Ducale di Sabbionetta,Mantova, Italy Oscuro y Verde Ajeno, Contemporánea Fine Art, Miami, FL COLOR | LINE | FORM: Abstract Art from Latin America, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX Beauty: 21st Century Interpretations, Ruiz-Healy Art, San Antonio, TX One, Naomi Silva Gallery, Atlanta, GA Diseño and Sabor. A cultural Celebration of Latino Design, Sponsored by INFINITI. Il Settimo Giorno, Church of Saint Giuseppe Palazzo delle Espozisioni, Faenza Italy Open 8, International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installation, Venice, Italy Nicolás Leiva, Naomi Silva Gallery, Atlanta, GA Disegnare Il marmo, Carrara Italy Para chuparse los dedos, Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Paolo Marcolongo Gallery, Padova Italy Beijing International Biennial of Art, Beijing, China Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, San Barnaba, Venice, Italy The Von Leibig Art Center, Naples, FL Oskaloosa-Walton Community College, Niceville Art Miami, Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Arco, Angel Romero Gallery, Madrid, Spain ArteBa, Gary Nader Fine Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Idiosyncrasies, Florida Atlantic University, Schmidt Center Gallery, Boca Raton, FL McCabe Contemporary Art, Cape Town, South Africa Ceramic – Italian Edition, Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Art Palm Beach, Gary Nader Fine Art, Palm Beach, FL Art Miami, Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Galería Legacy Panama Only Ceramic, Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Tomás Andreus Gallery, Santiago de Chile, Chile David Pérez McCollum Gallery, Guayaquil, Ecuador Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Polk Community College, Winter Haven, FL
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1994 1993 1992 1991 1990
Intar Gallery, New York, NY Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Gary Nader Fine Art, Coral Gables, FL Expresiones, David Pérez McCollum Gallery, Guayaquil, Ecuador Inter America Art Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, FL Metro Dade Cultural Resources, Miami, FL Art in Colombia, David Pérez McCollum Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia Opus Gallery, Coral Gables, FL Freites-Revilla Gallery, Boca Raton, FL Bank United, Opus Gallery, Miami, FL Atma Gallery, Jacob Karpio, San José, Costa Rica
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 Dallas Art Fair, Dallas, TX Arteamericas, Miami Beach, FL Artchicago, Chicago, IL 2008 ARTEahora 2008, Chicago, IL 2007 Profumo di Cacao, La Giardinera, Settimo Torinese, Italy Artemericas, Miami, FL Sofa Chicago, Chicago, IL 2005 Homenaje María Zambrano, Museo de la Américas, Madrid, Spain 2006 Art Miami, Miami, FL 2001 ArteBa, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2000 Art Miami, Miami, FL 1999 Art Palm Beach, Palm Beach, FL 1996 International Art Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador II Biennial, Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, Belair, FL 1994 Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium 1993 ArtFi, Bogotá, Colombia Art in Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia FIA, Caracas, Venezuela 1991 Art in Public Places, West Palm Beach, FL 1989 International Art Biennial, Valparaíso, Chile
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MUSEUM AND PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Indiana University of Texas at San Antonio, TX Berardo Collection Modern Art, Lisbon, Portugal Casa Golinelli, Bologna, Italy Marble Museum of Carrara, Carrara, Italy Museo Maria Zambrano, Malaga, Espana MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL José Luis Cuevas Museum, Mexico City, Mexico Molaa, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA Miami-Dade Community College, Mitchell Wolfson Campus, Miami, FL Metro-Dade Cultural Resources, Miami, FL Museum of Fine Arts of Tucumán, Argentina Fundación García Lorca, Madrid, Spain Empresas Líneas Marítimas Argentinas. Buenos Aires, Argentina Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Aguilares Collection, Tucumán, Argentina
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Recent Articles Batet, Janet. “El arte solidario con Haiti.” Sur de la Florida, El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Nov. 2010. LeMaire, Sandra. “Artists-Team-Up-to-Help-Haiti’s-Children.” News, Voice of America, Miami, May 2010. Suarez de Jesus, Carlos. “Of Time and the Shivers.” Art, New Times, Miami, Mar. 2010. Mo, Zayra. “Leiva: arte entre la purificacion personal y el juego.” Cultura, El Sentinel, Broward, May 2008. “Profumo de Cacao.” News, Exibart, Italy, Nov. 2007. Herrera, Adriana. “Contemporanea Fine Art presenta ‘Lo nuestro’.” Suplemento Artes & Letras, El Nuevo Herald, Miami, May 2007. Herrera, Adriana. “Instalacion de Leiva.” Suplemento Artes & Letras, El Nuevo Herald, Miami, May 2006. Cullum, Jerry. “Moving art trascends touch of kitsch.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta, Oct. 2005. Windhausen, Rodolfo A. “Nicolás Leiva saltó de Tucumán a China.” Revista Entrelíneas, Tucumán, Argentina, Mar. 2003. Windhausen, Rodolfo A. “Nicolás Leiva en la Bienal de China.” Revista Esmeralda, New York, Dec. 2003.
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“Nicolás Leiva,” El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Nov. 27, 2003. Windhausen, Rodolfo A. “Nicolás Leiva en la primera Bienal de China.” El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Sept. 14, 2003. Álvarez Bravo, Armando. “Nicolás Leiva (cq) y las provocaciones de la tierra.” El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Oct. 2002. Critical Essays Pau-Llosa, Ricardo. “Nicolás Leiva: Theatrical”, Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Parallel Currents: Highlights of the Ricardo Pau-Llosa Collection of Latin American Art, Aug. 2010. Pau-Llosa, Ricardo. “Nicolás Leiva”, Church of San Giudeppe, Palazzo Della Exposizione, Sculpture, Volume 26, Nº 1, New Jersey, Jan. – Feb. 2007. Kartofel, Graciela. “Nicolás Leiva”, Chiesa de San Giuseppe, Art Nexus, Volume 6, Nº 63, Colombia, 2007. Sokoloff, Ana.“Nicolás Leiva”, American Ceramic, Volume 15, Nº 1, New York, 2006. Kartofel, Graciela. “Diversas visiones manifiestan la amplitud de la cerámica como material,” Acento (a cultural weekly), Michoacán, México, Jun. 30, 2004. Windhause, Rodolfo A. “La profundidad metafísica de Nicolás Leiva,” (show catalogue), Legacy Fine Art Gallery, Panama, Apr. 1998. Plaza de Terán, Adriana. “Materia y Simbolismo en la obra del Tucumáno Nicolás Leiva,” Siglo XXI newspaper, Tucumán, Argentina, Aug. 27, 1995. Pau-Llosa, Ricardo. “Miami and the Art of Being in Exile,” Apalachee Quarterly, Exile Issue, Nº 38, Fall 1992. Santana, Raul. “Leiva Pinturas,” Cuaderno Thema Nº 2, Serie Arte, Publicacion de la Fundacion Ibatin, Estudios de Planificacion Urbanismo y Economia, Argentina, Dec. 1989. ARTIST BOOK Pau-Llosa, Ricardo, and Mariza Vescovo. Nicolás Leiva, The Fire of Self and Multiplication, Bandecchi & Vival, Sept. 2005.
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