Aguayo / Perez:
You do this to me and I do this to you
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| Nick Aguayo |
Aguayo’s work can be thought of as something of an essay on the function of the emblematic in abstract art inasmuch as his work consists of redressing the use of basic geometries, the application of bold colors and the deployment of various systems of arrangement. And yet, for all this, Aguayo’s work doesn’t resemble the feel of its modernist forerunners in touch, taste or program. There are no allusions here to essentialism, no remarks about the status of marks, and no determined effort to achieve the feeling of ‘organic unity’. If anything, Aguayo's work ossilates radically between a kind of neo-primitivism, a kitschy form of outsider art and the recent turn toward 'provisional' aesthetic experience.
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| Nick Aguayo |
However, it is also worth noting that Aguayo's engagement with the improvisational urge is everyewhere informed by his last few years of work which have largely consisted of making collaged paintings out of his previous paintings. In this regard, Aguayo's homespun use of bricollage relies on the permanent and unending recycliblity of idiograms — a strategy that seems to permeate mass culture at large. A key difference however is that his methodology feels more like a personal mix tape rather than a massified remix of abstraction's greatest hits. This shows itself in a certain sensitivity of selection, a deft sense of touch and even a longing for sentimental and authentic experience.
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| Nick Aguayo |
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| Nick Aguayo |
Bio: Nick Aguayo received his B.A. from UCLA in 2007 and his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. His work has been included in GLAMFA at California State University, Long Beach, The Armory Center for the Arts and INMO gallery. Aguayo's work was recently featured in New American Paintings # 97. He currently lives and works in Irvine, Ca.
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| Marcus Perez |
Perez’s work presents us with a direct confrontation with the ground and/or the grund of painting. But this consideration of the ground is itself twofold, or rather, it is a dialogue circumscribed by a kind of slippage between foreground and background and the doublebind of a discrepant use of materials. In painting, the ground is afterall, a thing in-itself, an open substrate and a pourous breathing surface. And yet, the ground also refers to the act of preparation. To have or produce a ground is also to prepare a ground. A ground is not given. The ground is what gives itself as groundless, ungrounded, the void, or simply, the unmade.
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| Marcus Perez |
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| Marcus Perez |
And yet, Perez’s pictures also seem to be about the idea of abstraction posited as a stain in the Lacanian sense of the term — as the thing which is at play in intersubjective (dis)identification — first by mimicry and second by entrance into the symbolic order, (two gestures which ultimately amount to one and the same thing). In this way Perez’s work can be seen as a kind of visual essay on the traumatic real, or on those conditions of suspended presentation that mark a gap in the symbolic order — a space that opens onto the event of subjective reflection. As such, Perez's pictures return us to the question of how we understand modern autonomy and its twofold determinations: 1) the autonomy of the individual from cultural conventions, and 2) the autonomy of the medium from its historical uses — only this duality is challenged in Perez's work because it is about the very inconsistent consistency of structuration itself.
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| Marcus Perez |
Working with the ground as a preparation, or rather incorporating it’s preparedness into the active dialog of painterly presentation, allows Perez’s canvases to show us the stage where the abyss of freedom was played out over the twentieth century as a tabula rasa. Moving between extreme reduction and an uncanny sense of absorption, Perez’s works illicit a kind of visual questioning that comes after post-painterly strategies and before minimalist stratagems, but which feels informed by both in equal measure. If anything, his works are a reminder that the failure of the subject to coincide with itself, (both the subject of painting with its materials and subject of expressionism with authorial intent), reveals the very suture that strives to foreclose any discussion of the subject as-such. Rather, the subject of Perez’s works come close to articulating what Adorno called non-identicality by presenting us with a series of characters that actively distort the substrate (ground). This occurs not only through the introduction of a medium without preparation but also as a result of the warping of the fabric around the constituent elements of painting. In this regard, Perez's imagery disrupts the idea of autonomous art by presenting the mark as an act that both (pre)figures and fractures its own ground, ultimately pulling the terms of how we think about medium specificity right out from under us.
Bio: Marcus Perez recieved his M.F.A. from the University of California Irvine in 2011, and his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Perez has recently shown in Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and Its Conditions at D-Block Projects and AC Projects as well as Nothing Comes from Nothing at La Cienega Projects in Culver City. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Bio: Marcus Perez recieved his M.F.A. from the University of California Irvine in 2011, and his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Perez has recently shown in Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and Its Conditions at D-Block Projects and AC Projects as well as Nothing Comes from Nothing at La Cienega Projects in Culver City. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.