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Excerpts
"Juan
Gomez's three oils span the range from figurative to abstract. Wide pink
brushstrokes define a semiabstract, serpentine figure in "Echo's Sweet
Manor" (2006).In "Quiet Reign" (2006), a nude woman, pink and
drawn in single, wide strokes, lies propped on an elbow, an infant at her side.
The painting's success shows that Mr. Gomez can captivate when he knows what he
wants to paint."
Daniel Kunitz,
The New York Sun, 2007
"Also new to
me were the paintings of Juan Gomez. His pink and acid-green canvases were
simultaneously pop/cartoonish, suggestive, and touching. Not to lay on the
superlatives too heavily, but the guy is an absolute virtuoso with the paint.
You canŐt tell from this reproduction, but with a few deft strokes, he gives us
one of the best images of a baby perhaps ever painted."
ArtistsUnite-NY.Org,
2007
Ň... Several
debut shows stand out from the last year. Juan Gomez, a young Colombian, was
given his at the CUE Foundation in February. He paints cartoonish stick figures
with emphasis on the erogenous zones. The limbs are extended beyond anatomical
credibility, reading like blown-up balloons. Despite the seeming misogyny of
such absurdist accentuations, his images exuded a lyrical sensuality.Ó
David Cohen,
The New York Sun, 2006
"In his
goofy and seductive paintings of female nudes, Juan Gomez does a nimble,
high-low balancing act. The low part is the nude, which Mr. Gomez renders in a
simplified style more appropriate for underground comic art than for
traditional fine painting. With elongated, tubular limbs and torsos, oversize
hands and feet and an emphasis on erogenous parts -- lips, nipples and
genitalia -- they are like sexy balloon sculptures.
On the other
hand, Mr. Gomez is attentive to the physical and abstract dimensions of
painting. Using wide brushes with insouciant immediacy, he paints his figures
on medium-large, squarish canvases, folding and bending their arms and legs to
create compositions that are at once expansive and compressive. Thinly yet
sensuously painted, the pictures glow like watercolors, and they call to mind
artists like Bonnard and Alex Katz.
But satiric humor
fortunately prevails over more high-minded purposes, especially in a set of
small, multifigure watercolors that are more formally transformative, more
sexually explicit and funnier."
Ken Johnson,
The New York Times, 2006
"The Cue Art
Foundation gives artists chosen by guest curators their debut solo exhibition
in New York. Under these auspices, the poet, translator, and art critic Vincent
Katz has selected Juan Gomez, a Colombian born in 1970 who has lived in America
since he was 20. His figure paintings have sophisticated goofiness: they are
subtle and crude at the same time, with one characteristic feeding the other.
Mr. Gomez paints stick figures in a cartoony way, with caricatured emphasis on
erogenous zones: breasts, buttocks, sexual organs, lips. The limbs are extended
beyond anatomical credibility, reading like sausages or blown-up balloons. Yet
in iconography and form, they connect beyond cartoons, recalling such a sources
as pre-Columbian sculpture, German Expressionism (the sylvan bathers of Otto
Mueller, for instance), and, in their tubularity, Lger.
Naturally, with
sexuality in the mix, Surrealism is a touchstone, too, but there is an absence
of violence or a need to shock in Mr. GomezŐs figuration. Despite the seeming
misogyny of his absurdist accentuations, these images exude a tender humor, a
genuinely lyrical sensuality. You sense a lust for life in the way figures are
conceived and executed.
Mr. GomezŐs
palette, touch and humor are blessed with warm brightness. He delights in
voluptuous brushstrokes that define light on flesh. His oil paint manages at
once fleshly succulence and a watercolor-like transparency. The figures are
splayed on a neutral ground, partially cropped, but generally filling the
available frame. Ň100382Ó (2004) for instance, has the distended buttocks and
the oversized foot defining the left and bottom edges, the head cropped at the
eyes on the top, and only the right edge clear of the figure and her gangly
limbs. While flatness gives emphasis to artifice, the figures are purposively
modeled. The ability to work like actual flesh and convey credible movement
despite the extremity of their elongation brings to mind an artist of very
different sensibility – Giacometti."
David Cohen,
The New York Sun, 2006
"If Francis
Bacon and MC Escher could've produced children, these would be the characters
in the drawings of Juan Gomez. Using ink on rice paper, Gomez's work reflects
Mayan and Japanese erotic drawings. Somewhere between romance and rape, the
couples in these drawings meet. The naked copulating bodies are like thin rods,
circles, with nipples like suctions. Their appendages are intertwined and when
looking it's hard to tell who's who and who's what is who's. The women have big
feet like mallets with a matching ass. The men have large penises that
accentuate the thinness of their stature. The women's long straight black hair
drapes their face, which simultaneously expresses both fear and delight. With
these simple forms, the captivated expression of these characters is complex
and naughty. Similar to contemporary film and media, the effect creates the
desire to look, with a bashfulness to study."
Jeana
Baumgardne, Zingmagazine, 2003
"Something
large and convoluted has invaded the mind of Colombia-born, New York living
painter Juan Gomez, as evidenced by the snaking forms slithering through his
new works currently hanging at Turner and Runyon gallery. The 1998 debut solo
show at New YorkŐs Audiello Fine Art by the young but prodigious 29 year old
painter was well-received look at a budding new talent with a penchant for
large-scale, abstract forms, big-stroke brushwork that gave his works a feeling
of studied activity, and a precocious brashness for his persistent use of a
dark, near black palette. In those works, Gomez displayed an interest in
layering of straight lines to achieve his finer nuances.
The new works
here are more nebulous and, surprisingly, more varied in effect than their
initial similarities would lead you to expect. All six untitled works from this
year are, once again, large collisions of colors, but here the form Gomez examines is the curve. That curve is
a sprawling, serpentine form that crawls back and forth across his canvases. It
looks as if Gomez applies his layers of colors and then takes a wide, flat edge
and drags it across the canvas, eliciting new color smears, smudges, and swells
in the process, as well as creating soft, almost polished surface textures in
its wake.
This dutiful
process allows Gomez to experiment with color, texture and curves to achieve an
emotional response. The two works
that face each other on the east and west of Turner and RunyonŐs front room
could almost be companion pieces. Both are approximately the same size and
employ a comparable palette: a smattering of green, bright orange, yellow, and
white swimming just under the surface of a dense layer of black, though which
his recurring motif is carved. But Gomez uses subtle differences in this works
to yield contrasting ends. The painting on the east wall feels softer in tone.
Its curve winds lazily through his pigments, like a river through a rain forest
as seen from above its canopy. The mood of the painting on the west wall,
however, is more menacing. Here the curves are tighter and more convoluted, the paint more
violently applied, and the feeling it elicits more nefarious. It is a microcosm
to its oppositeŐs macrocosm, a closed feeling that pushes its viewer away
versus the other friendly mien.
GomezŐs
enterprise has been compared to other abstract artists who work large, such as
Louise Fishman, and his gestural embellishments have earn him comparisons to
landscape painters Claude Lorraine and Frederic Church. But GomezŐ work is a
bit more obsessive. In fact, the paintings gathered here feel more like a
small-say, 3-by-3-inch-detail of a Jackson Pollock action painting magnified 20
times. (Additionally, Gomez has a comparable interest in the discovery of new
shapes and colors achieved when lines of oil paint intersect, but Gomez goes
for thick where Pollock preferred thin.) ItŐs the sort of (post) modern
endeavor dramatized by David HemmingsŐ character in Michelangelo AntonioniŐs
Blow-Up, where the systematic manipulation of an image uncovers new information
and, as a result, catalyses an epiphany.
ThereŐs also an
element of Albert Oehlen present, who felt that abstract painting should be as
nasty an inelegant as it wants to be. GomezŐ harsh palette and the corporeal
allusions his paintings conjure-donŐt be surprised if you find yourself putting
a hand over your stomach and pondering your intestines when viewing this show
– resurrect and innate, almost pre-Enlightenment suspicion about the
body. If these images kindle dark secrets about your flesh and blood, they are
from a time when science consisted of humors and alchemy.
But these
paintings are not all unsettling. GomezŐ celebration of yellow, red and green
hanging on the south wall in the front of the gallery looks more like a study
than a finished work. Its curve fluctuates from sharply defined to barely
discernible, as if it were a liquid being absorbed by thirsty earth. The
technique achieves something akin to a strobe effect of positive and negative
space, but doesnŐt use that to take you anywhere else. And the painting on the
east wall of the rear portion of the gallery is a surprisingly static piece
that is also, in comparison to the other colors fireworks, almost
monochromatic. The dominating maize yellow of this piece is cut with streaks of
grey and white that create a subtle, marbleized effect after the curve has been
cut into it. And though there are some areas of intense, possibly serendipitous
outcomes in the paintingŐs surface – the ridge line ribbons of pigment
along the right side of the painting are particularly dramatic – the
overall piece doesnŐt land the visceral punch of the showŐs finest entry. The
claim belongs to the 68 x 80 inch work hanging on the north wall in the rear of
the gallery and is the showŐs most compelling work. In it, Gomez layers
splashes of hot red, orange, bright green, and yellow over which a conservative
amount of black is layered, enough to give GomezŐ curve a fertile field to roam
through but not so much as to overpower it. The result is GomezŐ most organic
piece in the show, a conflation of activity and color that transforms the
canvas into a spontaneously combusting flurry of flames surrounding smoldering
embers before your very eyes. ItŐs a remarkably engaging work, an instance
where GomezŐ intellectual rigor and abstract orthodoxy are match by his
emotional intensity, and its powerful, hopeful portent of the things to come
from this young artist."
Bret Mccabe,
1999
"Juan Gomez,
a Colombian artist still in his 20s, has studied art mostly in the U.S. and
currently lives in New York. The four large oil abstractions shown at Audiello
evidence a hectic energy just barely held in check by the demands of form. In
Blind Hymn, the artist uses wet black oil almost entirely, applying the paint
in a frenetic series of diagonals down from the upper left. Speedy
brushstrokes, on reaching mid-canvas, make hairpin turns and race back upward,
the cumulative sheaf of marks as black and glossy as crow feathers. At the
lower right, a smaller, lighter series of hairpin strokes provide scale--in
much the same way that similarly positioned bits of vegetation do in a
landscape by Claude Lorrain or Frederic Church. Peering through the thicket of
foreground brushstrokes, we glimpse an abstract "landscape" rendered
in light gray, with faint pink highlights unmistakably suggesting a distant
safe haven.
Transient
Presence is the show's most serene invention, the background formed by fine
grained vertical brushstrokes of fairly dry paint in a meditative blend of
hues--gray, mauve, cocoa, with an occasional ocher, white, yellow or pink
highlight. Silken brushwork and highlights give the illusion of a dimly lit
reflective water surface, and Gomez suspends in front of it a connected zigzag
of silver-gray, which looks like a ribbon circling in space. He establishes
this illusion by making a stroke in one direction and then using a lighter
pigment for the stroke applied over the end of the first, before continuing
down and across in the opposite direction to repeat the process. While the background
and foreground spaces remain incompatible, in conjunction they evoke a mild,
nonspecific reverie.
Agitation returns
in Abrupt Innocence, where a gray-green torrent of brushstrokes with pink
overtones rushes from left to right, all foreground and impetuous energy. And
yet, by not beginning the strokes at the outer edges of the canvas, Gomez calls
into question the nature of that foreground. Finally, it has to be seen as a
relatively thin layer of paint, not as a representation of moving water. Unfortunately,
heightening abstract values in this case lessens the painting's overall impact.
It's an approximate success. In fact, you could apply that description to the
entire show, which, even so, counts as a more than respectable launch for a new
talent."
Alfred Corn,
Art in America
"New York is
currently experiencing an opportunity to reassess Abstract Expressionism,
especially in the works of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. That these two
museum retrospectives are taking place under the banner of Major Art Historical
Events, and have been well received by the general public and even the most
conservative of critics, seems to nail the lid on the coffin for this type of
art. Vigorous abstract painting, full of bravado, machismo and spirituality,
appears once and for all to be truly a thing of the past.
And there is the
current suite of paintings by Juan Gomez in his first one man show at Audiello
Fine Art. Gomez, a native of Colombia and recent graduate of New York School of
Visual Arts, makes a surprising move for a young, well educated artist: rather
than working in a neo conceptualist
or pseudo folk-derived manner, Gomez takes a stand as an abstract
painter.
For the past few
seasons there has been much talk about the resurrection of painting. Nothing however
was said about the return of the sort of gestural, lyrical abstraction that
first put New York on the international art map a century ago. Yet Gomez
manages to make an aesthetic that was long ago dismissed as having descended
into a clich suddenly seems fresh and worthy of consideration. His works are
fairly large in scale and stroke, and the arch of his sweeping brush seems to
blend colors on the surface of the canvas. The overall tone of this pictures is
a dingy gray-brown, perhaps in reference to the urban setting in which they
were made, but they are broken up with swatches of strong bright reds, yellows,
and whites. For all the spontaneity of the gesture, these paintings have a
constructed look to them, with horizontals and verticals playing off each other
with a tautly organized manner. The blurring of colors and frozen gesturality
are almost reminiscent of Gerhard RichterŐs abstractions, except that Gomez
appears to paint without a trace of irony or concern art historical baggage.
It is too soon to
tell if Gomez will manage to invest a new validity into the action painting of
the past or if he is going to
quickly add his name to the list of also-rans. The course he has chosen leads
very easily into the decay of mannered self parody. But for the moment it is
possible that he may be creating new prose and poetry from a heretofore dead
language."
John Angeline,
Art Nexus, 1999