Art in America, No. 5, May, p.158, 1999.
"Juan Gomez at Audiello."
By Alfred Corn.

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.