Press

Gallery Juno is pleased to present a new series of paintings by artist Rebeca Mendoza, whose large-scale works reflect a dialogue between the internal, emotive driving forces of visual creation and the plasticity and physicality of paint and canvas.

The mixed-media paintings in Serie Rosa attempt, on one level at least, to forge an expressive truth… a concurrence of the metaphysical spirit of the artist – of emotion and intuition- and the formal language of art – of painterly drawing and shape-making – to be able to communicate and make concrete that which is intangible.

These dynamic works are a coalescence of soft forms and vigorously applied paint on raw canvas. Through gestural abstraction and a vibrating patchwork of color and tonal nuances, the drama of Mendoza’s inner vision plays out. Pale pink, for which the series takes its title, is the star here, casting a serene, warm shadow over the proceedings and immediately affecting one’s experience of the paintings. Pulsing irregular shapes and bold linear strokes float in open spaces and merge together to form a poetic visual fantasy. Loose, broken horizontal lines of a deeper, stronger tone – often black – bisect, dissect, and seemingly cleave these harmonious amalgams, these pleasant reveries, in two… like the dark trail of a smoking missile piercing the clouds as it streaks through the open sky.

Mendoza’s painterly gestures and shape-making, combined with the perceptual effects of color, line and form… of gravity and levity, of the drama of light and shadow, all contribute to the tension of the pictorial space, the ambiguity of reference, and ultimately the synthesizing of individual experience to visual metaphor and concrete emotive sentiment. If there is a truth, it is, with Serie Rosa, that Mendoza is an artist engaged in a work and process that translates this experience with great intensity and refinement.

Rebeca Mendoza was born in the Buenos Ares in Argentina. She is a graduate of the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Art. Mendoza has worked closely with celebrated Argentine artists such as sculptor Aurelio Macchi, and painter Alberto Delmonte.

GALLERY JUNO
594 Broadway, Suite 202, New York, NY 10012
Tel: (212) 431-1515  info@galleryjuno.com

NEW YORK, NY – Artemisa Gallery is pleased to announce the show “Being-Doing” by Rebeca Mendoza. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from January 29th to February 28th, 2015. The artist will be present at the opening reception and for private showings.

The work of Mendoza and Vilar have something essential in common. In both of them, the brush seems to be the extension of the arm, mind and soul of the artist. Both artists focus on their creative process and it is their intuition and playfulness that drive their brushstrokes and the colors present in their work.

Rebeca Mendoza paints without a preconceived idea; in her work there is a synchronicity between emotion and action. She lets her inner energy flow, and that energy guides her intuition. Mendoza overlaps layers of color, forms and meaning. The upper layers exhibit traces of the unique gestural intervention of the artist with shapes, stains and lines; the inner ones suggest archetypes that the viewer, intrigued, seeks to uncover.

Valeria Vilar’s work takes the spectator to a world of innocence and fantasy. Her strokes move freely in the paper, where she mixes chalkboards, pencils and acrylics, generating ethereal paintings that remind us of childhood tales and happy endings.

Artemisa Gallery, co-founded by Mariana de Diego Broda and Vanina Waizmann, specializes in Contemporary Latin American Art.
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
For press or sales inquiries, please contact the gallery directors at 212.929.4506 or by email at:
Vanina Waizmann: vanina@artemisagallery.com Mariana de Diego: mariana@artemisagallery.com
http://www.artemisagallery.com

Rebeca Mendoza: Cognitive Intuition

The vestiges of painting reveal before us a variety of paths guided by distinct conceptions that survive the passing of time. Luckily, however, these guides are porous enough to allow for new proposals or searches. The opening of a personal space within the chaos of a multiplicity of images and meanings is a very complex ethical, aesthetical and spiritual task. In this sense, the work of Rebeca Mendoza asserts itself, with the authority irradiating from a singular experience, in such a revised field as is the field of abstraction, where it becomes difficult to devise new paradigms. It underlies in her, unchanged, the power of the liberation held by art as a practice and it reflects back an intimate image together with the emergence of a personal and tenacious search. Her repertoire is a tribute to the artists she admires, but her strategies, her ways of constructing meaning, shine with vitality and renovation. The art in her works responds to a mixed model that combines and nourishes itself throughout the process that gives rise to pictorial experience. It is intuitive and conscious, a synthesis between the tempest of abstract expressionism and the explicit clarity of color field painting. Her work on the plane is based on overlapping layers of shapes and meaning. The upper layers exhibit traces of the gestural intervention of the artist with organic shapes, stains and lines, fast textures that challenge the plane and assert the physical presence of the painting. The inner layers, between graphism and symbols, suggest archetypes that the spectator, intrigued, seeks to uncover. This tension generated by reading between abstraction and the traces of an unresolved meaning modifies the increasingly inactive traditional agreement between the artist and the public. These works are a return to innocent contemplation through a dynamic and exciting experience.

Máximo Jacoby
Member of the Argentine Association of Art Critics (AACA)