Maria Rendón: Missing Rib
Maria Rendón: Missing Rib
SBCC Atkinson Gallery
February 27-March 27, 2015
I make works inspired by the space between reality and perception, the present and the absent, the normal and the abnormal. –Maria Rendón
Maria Rendón says that what is not there interests her just as much as what is there. In the new work featured in the Missing Rib: Maria Rendón exhibition, the artist operates at the margins of representation using a controlled improvisation of watery acrylic on paper. She carefully, although sometimes precariously, balances on the thin line between absence and presence with her contained flow of paint.
Untitled is part of a series of centrally composed and intimate paintings featuring luminescent ovals that simultaneously allude to egg and vagina. Vibrant and fleshy in color, though not at all concrete, the form is static while the medium moves. The action is not in the imagery, but in the paint itself. In this investigation of being and not being, Rendón literally circumscribes the source of life, but nothing is born of the anticipatory opening.
A set of free floating objects orbit around a murky black zygote in Missing Rib. Here, Rendón materially investigates (in)tangibility via opacity with layered paint that is pooled and parched. In particular, the thick white paint hints at calcium deposits and the mythical bone of the title. However, as often as not, the white is translucent and insubstantial revealing simultaneous, yet opposing, readings of origin and regression.
Working on a much larger scale in Modern Humans Emerge, Rendón roots her nebulous yellow figure in a toxic pink horizon line. In this piece, there is increased interplay between foreground and background, a liquid blurring of the line that causes both the form and its place to move in and out of focus. Concurrently solid and ethereal, the central body is made up of intersecting elements.
Composed of salvaged painted paper cut into large shapes and woven together to create a massive arc, Accidental Virtue sprawls across the far wall of the gallery. Unconstrained by the paper’s ruled edge, the amoebic forms are visceral and urgently placed. Immersive in size, the piece includes the viewer in the crisscrossing evolutions of the artist herself, the repurposed paintings, and the primordial.
With Dust to Dust, the artist completes the cycle of the exhibition by coaxing her painting into the third dimension. Draped remnants of old pieces hang in concentric loops from a found branch. Once negative space, these surplus cuttings become the primary object. The tangled elliptical structure offers the possibility of actually entering the ovum referenced in other works.
Embracing the dichotomy of release and restraint in her painting, Rendón creates pseudo Rorschach tests that temptingly invite identification of the fleeting image. Like clouds and starling murmurations, the images and their interpretations are in constant flux. Viewers join the artist in asking: What is there? And, as importantly, what is not there?
Sarah Cunningham
Atkinson Gallery Director, SBCC
February 2015
Maria Rendón says that what is not there interests her just as much as what is there. In the new work featured in the Missing Rib: Maria Rendón exhibition, the artist operates at the margins of representation using a controlled improvisation of watery acrylic on paper. She carefully, although sometimes precariously, balances on the thin line between absence and presence with her contained flow of paint.
Untitled is part of a series of centrally composed and intimate paintings featuring luminescent ovals that simultaneously allude to egg and vagina. Vibrant and fleshy in color, though not at all concrete, the form is static while the medium moves. The action is not in the imagery, but in the paint itself. In this investigation of being and not being, Rendón literally circumscribes the source of life, but nothing is born of the anticipatory opening.
A set of free floating objects orbit around a murky black zygote in Missing Rib. Here, Rendón materially investigates (in)tangibility via opacity with layered paint that is pooled and parched. In particular, the thick white paint hints at calcium deposits and the mythical bone of the title. However, as often as not, the white is translucent and insubstantial revealing simultaneous, yet opposing, readings of origin and regression.
Working on a much larger scale in Modern Humans Emerge, Rendón roots her nebulous yellow figure in a toxic pink horizon line. In this piece, there is increased interplay between foreground and background, a liquid blurring of the line that causes both the form and its place to move in and out of focus. Concurrently solid and ethereal, the central body is made up of intersecting elements.
Composed of salvaged painted paper cut into large shapes and woven together to create a massive arc, Accidental Virtue sprawls across the far wall of the gallery. Unconstrained by the paper’s ruled edge, the amoebic forms are visceral and urgently placed. Immersive in size, the piece includes the viewer in the crisscrossing evolutions of the artist herself, the repurposed paintings, and the primordial.
With Dust to Dust, the artist completes the cycle of the exhibition by coaxing her painting into the third dimension. Draped remnants of old pieces hang in concentric loops from a found branch. Once negative space, these surplus cuttings become the primary object. The tangled elliptical structure offers the possibility of actually entering the ovum referenced in other works.
Embracing the dichotomy of release and restraint in her painting, Rendón creates pseudo Rorschach tests that temptingly invite identification of the fleeting image. Like clouds and starling murmurations, the images and their interpretations are in constant flux. Viewers join the artist in asking: What is there? And, as importantly, what is not there?
Sarah Cunningham
Atkinson Gallery Director, SBCC
February 2015
Exhibition Catalog
| sarahcunningham_missingrib.pdf |
