February 16th - March 11th, 2020

Opening Sunday, February 16th from 6 - 9PM

Loriel Beltran started working on these paintings over a decade ago focusing on cuts, materialities and what returns as an inscription where the conceptual and the physical converge. Beltran’s work insists on holding within a type of collapse and emergence, observing time’s plasticity as if it was possible to approach it via color, hyper-defined lines, weight, and breakages. One can gather that Beltran’s painting practice considers the heterogeneity of experience beyond the aura of organic unity1, emphasizing time as a crucial actor.

A tactile mise-en-scene appears when the imaginary thickens, and it is at that very moment when years of collecting, devising, and pouring pigment, seem to solidify in the irretractable limit established by the cut. This act (cutting), as a modality, affirms a space that holds all subjective vibes and timings in suspense. In Beltran’s praxis nothing is assured, but rather, all is sliced and re-formatted by what resides beyond the concept of Loss. It’s best not to offer any resolutions here, as Painting doesn’t carry the delusion of progress anymore, but rather, presents the solidarity of the circular as its vibrance and pulse.

Beltran mentions that he is interested in “real weight and historical weight in coalition”, considering Painting’s capacity to hold time within, symbolically and on the surface. His paintings, also, seem intent to function as an aporia, containing internal contradictions that point to the relationships between abstraction and figuration, the space that exists between Painting and Sculpture, or the inevitable (gravity) and the intentional (art-making).

Here are a few excerpts from Beltran’s notes on his works:

“These paintings are as intricate as the baroque, and as sparse as minimalism. They are as much Gian Lorenzo Bernini as they are Agnes Martin. They are as much Bridget Riley in their opticality as they are Richard Serra in their process and weight.”

As a group they also subtly reference art historical tropes. There is Contrapposto, Landscape, Monochrome, Op and Kinetic art, stripes, etc. They are also both representational and abstract. Representational in that they depict reality in it’s full color spectrum, and also that they are part of a real sliced object. Abstract in that they are about line and color, weight and form.

They are also about Painting asserting its own definition, and the experience that comes with witnessing an object that is too complex to understand in a single viewing, as a single image. They assert Painting as objects, and reject paintings easily circulating as images.

Loriel Beltran was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1985. At age fifteen he moved to Miami where he later obtained a BFA from the New World School of the Arts. Beltran’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum, Miami; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; the Museo de Arte Acarigua Araure, Acarigua, Venezuela; the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; etc. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Wolfsonian Museum Bridge Tender’s house; the Fredric Snitzer Gallery; and at the non-profit Locust Projects, in Miami.

Beltran was awarded the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists, in 2015. He was a co-founder and co-director of the artist run gallery and collective Noguchi Breton (formerly GUCCIVUITTON).

1 See Bubloch, Benjamin: Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting. October, Vol 16, pp. 39-68, 1981.