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May 8, 2008- June 3, 2008
Reception: May 8, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Ivan Rojas
Serrano Contemporary / Sonnet Gallery
547 W 27th StA reception on Thursday May 8 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. will open an exhibition of Ivan Rojas’s works entitled Voyager at Serrano Contemporary/Sonnet Gallery in Chelsea. The public is invited. This exhibition will run until June 3rd.
Ivan Rojas was born in 1965 in the town of La Asuncion on Venezuela’s Margarita Island, where he still resides with his wife and children. His bold, bright compositions reflect the painter’s Caribbean roots in their abstract depiction of sun, sea and daily life. The paintings appear simple but contain multiple layers of meaning through variations in line, color, shape, texture and position. Rojas’s work displays a technical mastery of color and classical composition, an appreciation for the power of allegory and iconography, and a talent for the rendering of time from the American Indian perspective.
Rojas’s work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including MOLA in Los Angeles, California, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, the Venezuelan Embassy in Mexico, the Coro Art Museum, and the Mario Abreu Museum of Contemporary Art. Since 1987 his work has been seen at more than 40 shows and exhibitions from Caracas to New York, published in Florida Design and Ocean Drive magazines, and exhibited annually at art shows in New York, Caracas and Los Angeles. Serrano Contemporary / Sonnet Gallery is privileged to represent Rojas exclusively in North America.
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The Voyager establishes with space relations which are mediated by the desire for search. In the case of an artist, the journey through visual forms may bifurcate until designing a discursive labyrinth. In the work of Iván Rojas, the development of a visual concept implies a bidirectional journey. On one side, we find the natural itinerary through the shapes of the world; on the other, we follow an interior path, a shift towards his profound consciousness. The rowers - an icono grapheme motif present in his work since the Caribana series – are the metaphor for a travel that began with his first navigation from Margatita Island to the mainland. Other journeys would follow, concrete ones, aesthetic ones, emotional and intimate trips around Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, the US, Buddhism, the Christian mystics, his family, Picasso, pre-Columbian art and Chillida, among others. Each one of these journeys is, at the same time, a constitutive part of his own artistic formation, which took him from figurative painting towards the abstract – without having established himself yet in a fixed point –, from the magical to the mystical and from a personal imagery to the signs of hollowness, which dictate the rhythm of his latest rowers.
(...)
The Voyager: Signs of Hollowness exposes the states of mutation which occur in the volumes of the pieces. These signs correspond to those of our existence, hence to the oscillation of the universal happening. In this sense, the work points towards the idea that the recognition of emptiness is the acceptance of the complexity of the place we occupy in the cosmos as physical, emotional and spiritual beings. It is an experience related to the transitory aspect of perception that unravels every attempt to reach an illusive stability. It is the affirmation of the instant and its ties to contradiction, of an ephemeral time and space, perhaps the true dominions of life.
HUMBERTO VALDIVIESO
CURATOR
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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