Tag: June 2018

Interview with Alvaro Naddeo for “AmeriCan’t”

Thinkspace is proud to present our third exhibition AmeriCan’t with Brazillian born and Los Angeles-based artist Alvaro Naddeo in the project room. Naddeo’s watercolors combine textures and edges in compositional amalgams. His interest in the life of the unassuming object extends to billboards and signage, cast away containers and boxes, and domestic and industrial spaces, conjoined and superimposed in unexpected mashups, or cultural relics that speak of use and disposal in the contemporary city.  In anticipation of AmeriCan’t, our interview with Alvaro Naddeo discusses the shows inspiration, his creative process, and what it feels like leading up to the opening reception.

Join us for the opening of “AmeriCan’t”, Saturday, June 30th from 6 to 9 pm.

SH: Tell us about this show. What is the inspiration? What were you exploring in the work?

AN: The inspiration for this show comes from my desire to create something where I’m able to mix memories with textures of the places I’ve been while at the same time making a social and political commentary on our society. AmeriCan’t is about the marginalized, the minorities, those who can see and smell everything good that America has but never allowed to get there.

SH: Where do you source inspiration? How do you capture those ideas for pieces; do you have a sketchbook on hand or is it just a note to yourself in your phone?

AN: Ideas appear at random times, and usually is just a piece of an idea, only one of the elements that I want to use not the whole painting. I don’t have a sketchbook, so I usually make some really rough sketches on post-it notes. Later, when I’m ready to start a new painting, I go through the small rough notes and combine a few of them.

SH: How do you plan out your compositions?

AN: My compositions are the result of many back and forths between some rudimentary 3D shapes, Photoshop, Illustrator and rough sketches. I may start with a pencil sketch, scan it, get a shape on 3D, draw over it, then move it to Photoshop and Illustrator where I make sure the perspectives and proportion of the elements are as good as I can have them, by this point I’m able to move to the paper and start painting. Only at that stage is when I create textures and also when I add light and shadows.

SH: What excites you about your work / creative process?

AN: The part that I enjoy the most is painting, pushing the watercolor on paper. It is a mix of a lot of freedom, letting it randomly and organically move and settle, while at the same time trying to control it and make it exactly what I would like it to do.

SH: What frustrates you about your work / creative process?

AN: Usually, nothing, sometimes the fact that watercolor doesn’t allow to fix most mistakes.

SH: If you could be a character in any movie for a day; who would you be in what film and why?

AN: I would like to be Ferris Bueller and take a day off.

SH: How do you approach developing work for an exhibition? Do you immediately jump into work on it, or are you more of a procrastinator?

AN: My production is more or less constant, independent if I have shows scheduled or not. Obviously having a deadline for a show scares me with the idea of not having enough to show, so I push my productivity a little more. I may be a little slower if I don’t have a deadline but I’m never not doing or thinking of a painting, I’m constantly producing something.

SH: What is your Meyers-Briggs or Zodiac Sign? Does it influence your work / artistic process?

AN: My Myers-Briggs, if I remember correctly was: Introvert, Thinking, but the other two letters were not well defined I was pretty much in the middle between them. I’m a Gemini and neither of those things has any influence over my work.

SH: Can you explain what it feels likes to anticipate the opening of your exhibition, the opening night?

AN: It’s really exciting, it’s an amazing feeling to have all your work hanging on those walls and having people looking and talking to you about them. The production part is very lonely, so the show is a rare opportunity to get feedback. Also when I’m done with a painting I just store it, so when a show is up is also a chance for me to look again at work that I’ve done a few months before and that I may have forgotten about them a bit. It is a good opportunity to have a fresh look at them, almost like looking at something I didn’t paint myself.

SH: Has there been an artistic catalyst in your life? Something, someone, some event that made a significant impact on you that has lead you to where you are now.

AN: Yes, quitting a job in an advertising agency in 2009 was an accidental catalyst. I quit the job at that agency, even before getting a new one because I believed I wasn’t being paid fairly. While I looked for a new job in another advertising agency, I focused on not being too lazy, so I created a few tasks to keep myself creatively busy, for example, I started drawing anything every day. Soon I got a new job but I kept drawing, Those unpretentious drawings slowly progressed and became my watercolor paintings a couple of years later.

Interview with Wiley Wallace for “Stay Connected”

Thinkspace is proud to present Phoenix-born painter Wiley Wallace’s upcoming body of work Stay Connected, alongside Juan Travieso in the gallery’s main room. Wallace combines realistic renderings with elements of the surreal, and near-magical references that include eerily cast light sources bordering on the supernatural.  In anticipation of Stay Connected, our interview with Wiley Wallace discusses the shows inspiration, his creative process, and the childhood catalyst that lead to the adult artists.

Join us for the opening of “Stay Connected”, Saturday, June 30th from 6 to 9 pm.

SH: Tell us about this show. What is the inspiration? What were you exploring in the work?

WW: The show is called ‘Stay Connected’. There were a lot of sources of inspiration for this new series of paintings. Some of those sources are really hard to put into words, but a clear source is my kids; how they experience technology, movies, books, holidays. Trying to see the way things are today through my children’s eyes. The world today seems equal parts fascinating and frightening. It’s also exploring how to tell a story, but keeping that story open-ended, using symbols that are loaded, but ambiguous enough that there can be several interpretations.

SH: Where do you source inspiration? How do you capture those ideas for pieces; do you have a sketchbook on hand or is it just a note to yourself in your phone?

WW: I draw in a sketchbook a good amount. I take a lot of photos of my kids on our family adventures.

SH: How do you plan out your compositions?

WW: After creating source material, I then piece everything together and layout the composition in Photoshop and Cinema 4D. Once I feel like the composition is telling a story, then I’ll try to paint it.

SH: What excites you about your work / creative process?

WW: I really like painting. I like the process of painting. I enjoy sitting and listening to music, or an audiobook or podcast and the feeling of making something simultaneously. Being able to zone out and create something feels amazing.

SH: What frustrates you about your work / creative process?

WW: Nothing really. It’s fun.

SH: If you could be a character in any movie for a day; who would you be in what film and why?

WW: Not a parent from a Disney movie.

SH: How do you approach developing work for an exhibition? Do you immediately jump into work on it, or are you more of a procrastinator?

WW: We have 3 kids, so I schedule the time months in advance. There has to be a very specific calendar with mini-deadlines that help get to the next point.

SH: What is your Meyers-Briggs or Zodiac Sign? Does it influence your work / artistic process?

WW: I’m a Cancer sign. I guess I like being quiet and at home, creating when I can. I’ve never done a Meyers-Briggs test.

SH: Has there been an artistic catalyst in your life? Something, someone, some event that made a significant impact on you that has lead you to where you are now.

WW: I grew up in a mom & pop sign shop. My parents spent all day making, painting, and installing signs. Me and my brother were always down there, making and painting stuff in a big industrial work space. We would build things, play with paint, make messes. Sometimes we got to pitch in and help my parents on jobs. Growing up in that environment had a significant impact on me.

Alvaro Naddeo’s “AmeriCan’t” Closes Out June at Thinkspace Projects Culver City

 

ALVARO NADDEO
AmeriCan’t
June 30, 2018 – July 21, 2018
Concurrently on view in the Thinkspace project room is AmeriCan’t, featuring new works by Brazilian born and Los Angeles-based artist Alvaro Naddeo. Interested in the study of castaway objects and the subtle graphic nuances of urban detritus gleaned from the city sphere, the artist combines its textures and edges in compositional amalgams. His interest in the life of the unassuming object extends to billboards and signage, cast away containers and boxes, and domestic and industrial spaces, conjoined and superimposed in unexpected mashups, or cultural relics that speak of use and disposal in the contemporary city.

Working primarily in watercolor on paper, Naddeo achieves an impressive level of hyperrealistic rendering, bestowing unexpected poetry to the lowly remnants of the city’s waste and urban recesses. Naddeo’s works offer a commentary on the excessive momentums of contemporary consumerism, while his imagery explores the decay and deterioration of the city-worn.

Juan Travieso’s “Entropy” Closes Out June at Thinkspace Projects Culver City

JUAN TRAVIESO
Entropy
June 30, 2018 – July 21, 2018

(Los Angeles, CA) – Thinkspace is pleased to present new works by Cuban-born painter Juan Travieso in Entropy. Currently based out of Miami and New York, Travieso creates visually complex worlds suspended in a state of fracture. Dismantled into seismic shards, these fragments are subject to the disorienting effects of constant spatial interruption. Combining a realist painting technique with surreal juxtapositions, spatial splicing, bright palettes, and geometric abstraction, Travieso conveys the textures of a universe in breach, distorted and split by its endless potential for loss. Fascinated by the extinction of countless endangered species and the often irrevocable influence of human intervention, Travieso presents the reality of a world in transition. His compositions often look like digitized renderings, informed by the awkward, artificial simultaneity of 3-D models, and devolve in moments to pixelated digital facsimiles, reminding us of the unavoidably temporal nature of disappearance.

Travieso was born in Havana, Cuba. He credits his love of color in his work to the scarcity of resources in his home country, a stark contrast to the sheer availability of art supplies and imagery in the US. Inspired by this profusion of access to information and paint colors, the artist has taken on a series dedicated to endangered bird species, capturing them on the cusp of imminent disappearance. In the works, their facets are compartmentalized into geometric patterns and their edges striated to dissolve into quasi-architectural grids. A requiem of sorts for the irremediably compromised state of our biodiversity, Travieso’s paintings capture the cataclysmic energy of its decay and the transience of this biological exhaustion and loss, proposed in stark contrast to the permanent ambitions of the digital age. This re-articulation of environmental damage through the visual and graphic language of digital culture gets at the fundamental contradiction between the organic and the artificial, the finite and the infinite; the natural world is forever at odds with the perpetuity of artificial, manmade technologies.

As an activist and environmentalist, Travieso hopes that his dynamic works will draw attention to the ecological carelessness we’ve abetted and the necessity of our continued vigilance in the preservation of what’s left. This compassion for the vulnerable and voiceless has clear political affinities for Travieso, relating to his personal experiences growing up in Communist Cuba where persecution for perceived dissent was a constant threat and the silencing of censorship unavoidable. Perhaps in keeping with this tendency to combine oppositions like freedom and constraint, Travieso depicts the lawlessness and diversity of nature at odds with the enforced geometry of human constructs.

Wiley Wallace’s “Stay Connected” Closes Out June at Thinkspace Gallery

WILEY WALLACE
Stay Connected
June 30, 2018 – July 21, 2018

(Los Angeles, CA) – Thinkspace is pleased to present Stay Connected, featuring new works by Phoenix-born painter Wiley Wallace. Playful and ambiguous, his luminous and ostensibly radioactive worlds suggest a metaphysical interest in the possibility of alternate realities: the endlessly shapeshifting and protean nature of fantasy at the intersection of the imagined and “real.” Wallace’s paintings combine realistic rendering with elements of the surreal, and near-magical references that include eerily cast light sources bordering on the supernatural. Playful and macabre, his works combine intense thematic contrasts between light and dark to achieve suspense and evasion.

Children are a recurring theme in his compositions, representing a kind of primordial link to something invisible and beyond comprehension, exempt from the rationalizations of the adult. Often using his own children as models, Wallace’s narratives are open-ended, filled with suggestion and partial disclosures rather than forceful assertions or posited certainties. The themes of connection and communication resonate throughout Wallace’s imagery, as the works’ protagonists seem ever in search of fugitive contact. The skeleton is a recurring figure throughout Wallace’s imagery as well, appearing at times as a sinister harbinger of some kind and at others as Halloween costume level kitsch.

Wallace’s pieces convey a kind of sci-fi nostalgia harkening back to a Spielberg-era of extraterrestrial-themed filmmaking. At times their implied innocence and naiveté give way to darker and more dystopian readings, surfacing amidst the neon-hued glow.