The Met, December 22, 1999.
"Serpentine Similar" Juan Gomez explores the slippery slopes of curves in his new works.
By Bret Mccabe

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 York’s 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 Runyon’s 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 opposite’s macrocosm, a closed feeling that pushes its viewer away versus the other friendly mien.

Gomez’s 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 Gomez’ 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.) It’s the sort of (post) modern endeavor dramatized by David Hemmings’ character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where the systematic manipulation of an image uncovers new information and, as a result, catalyses an epiphany.

There’s also an element of Albert Oehlen present, who felt that abstract painting should be as nasty an inelegant as it wants to be. Gomez’ harsh palette and the corporeal allusions his paintings conjure-don’t 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. Gomez’ 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 doesn’t 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 painting’s surface – the ridge line ribbons of pigment along the right side of the painting are particularly dramatic – the overall piece doesn’t land the visceral punch of the show’s 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 show’s 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 Gomez’ curve a fertile field to roam through but not so much as to overpower it. The result is Gomez’ 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. It’s a remarkably engaging work, an instance where Gomez’ 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.