Ricardo Gonzalez
Asya Geisberg Gallery is delighted to open “Traces”, Ricardo Gonzalez’s third show with the gallery. Coming on the heels of a two-museum retrospective in Querétaro and Oaxaca, Mexico, Gonzalez here presents a return to the nuanced minimal style of his first exhibition with the gallery. “Traces” has solidified the artist’s command of quick, spare, and deliberate gestures - the artist's hand knowing explicitly just how implicit a brushstroke can remain. Barely present black strokes on canvases the color of manila - suggestive of the elementary nature of charcoal on paper - all flirt with a perception of fundamentality and conviction, as when a child need only make a square and triangle to suggest a house. Indeed Gonzalez has always elevated the unself-conscious freedom of his earlier years, by equating them with the pantheon of European and American Expressionists. Recently, Gonzalez has embraced the notion of archetypes, emanating from Carl Jung’s philosophy, connoting a timeless commonality to his everyday gestures and emotions.
Gonzalez’s energetic brushstrokes echo a simplicity and rawness; yet they are considered and restrained. As per the exhibition's title, they suggest traces of a smile, a hand, or a boot, barely committing to a fragment or outline of a body. This sparseness attests to a sense of immediacy, as if each mark was made with a single, unfiltered impulse, embodying a visceral freedom, and the fleeting sense of self. In turn, the creamy grounds of ochres and browns, splodges and drips, build to a painterly intensity.
With titles like Zephyr - a word originating from the Greek god of wind - Whisper, or Breathing Space, the emphasis lands on the paintings’ airy surfaces, and lines that dissolve as quickly as they are set. Summoning no more than a suggestive curlicue for hair or a halting arc for a smile, the paintings swim with an unflappable immediacy. The painting Reflection offers another frequent Gonzalez motif: the twin, doppelganger or two sides of a personality. Adept at drawing and its possibilities of line - the works jibe on the gestures of smoke, the movement of a conductor’s hands, or the whirling dervish of buttery beiges in Dreamer - an interpretative EEG of REM sleep. For Gonzalez, interpretation is never fixed, and so the closed lids could also imply interiority, meditation, or wonder. In Floating Head, a hand reaches into the brain as if to pull out an idea, and indeterminate lines swirl, perhaps the messiness of racing thoughts. With humor, nuance, and a tender touch, in “Traces”, Gonzalez winkingly proposes a poetry of putting into relief the ineffable Cogito ergo sum.