ARCHIVES
........ ?

REVIEWS
Art Nexus, No.31, February-April, 1999. "Juan Gómez" Audiello Fine Arts By John Angeline 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 cliché 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 Richter’s 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.
Back