Santiago Parra: ARCHETYPE

Solana Beach, California – Madison Gallery presents noted Colombian artist Santiago Parra's first West Coast solo exhibition. Parra is known for his large, abstract and highly expressive black and white paintings. His canvases capture the suspended flatness of the calligraphy-like imagery, harmonizing two seemingly incompatible aesthetic moments, spontaneity and pondering, which are all shaped by movement, strength, gravity and skill of the Columbian artist’s creative process. He explores the expressive possibilities of the quintessential abstract form. This exhibition focus on the recurring motifs Santiago has identified in his work;

“Lately I’ve started to see recurring patterns in the paintings, underlying structures, an unpremeditated order. This formations, often concatenations of an archetypical geometry have become ineludible to my eyes. Ive always been intrigued by the source of this arrangements but never before have they appeared so manifestly than in some of the works in this exhibition. With Archetype Ive come to ask myself a question: If this underlaying geometry emerges from the subconscious, do we all have access to a common pool of archetypical forms ? Does geometry lives inside of us not only as the pattern shaping our organic tissues but also as images abiding in our subconscious?”

Art Critic Peter Frank states of this new body; “ If Parra allows his subconscious to dictate the forms his black pigment takes on its white ground, do the resulting paintings convey such a sense of the accidental or even of the pre-conscious? There is a gracefulness, even poise, to these expansive compositions that could make us question their automatism. But the explosivity that comes to the fore or lurks just behind these twisting and leaping marks does not feel staged; and, indeed, the marks themselves never fully give up their implications of the inchoate, driven as they seem to be by some sort of anthropomorphized electricity. Parra is not looking to “express” himself, he is looking to open up what can’t be expressed and let that energy drive him.”