LORIEL BELTRÁN: TO NAME THE LIGHT
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist Loriel Beltrán. Featuring five new paintings, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality.
May 14 - June 22, 2024
Beltrán has become known for his sculptural accumulations that poetically combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Employing custom-made molds and layers of paint, each work is produced through a meticulous process of pouring, embedding, compressing, drying, slicing, and finally assembling each vibrantly pigmented cross section into an abstract composition.
Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the centerpiece of the exhibition, is the literal and metaphorical collapse and compression of the body of work the artist produced for his recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul. Beltrán has incorporated residual elements and pieces of works from that show into the compressed layers, making the palette a register of prior paintings.
In a recent interview with the artist, curator Katherine Rochester states, “Beltrán's work applies increasing pressure to the distinctions between categories that organize our anthropocentric view of the world. Nature and culture, science and philosophy, language and image, sculpture and painting are all subjected to a series of artistic operations that create new forms from a hybrid use of references and materials. ‘What remains on the other side of total collapse?’”
The sense of awe, mystery, and grandeur that Turner and Friedrich sought to invoke in their atmospheric impressions of the natural sublime serve as a touchstone for Beltrán. While he employs quite different techniques, Beltrán is interested in encouraging a similarly direct viewing experience that connects us with our surroundings on an emotional and spiritual level, inviting the possibility of infinity and wonder into the gallery. In Sulfur Aerosol, Beltrán depicts an acidic skyscape composed of layers of cotton candy pink, baby blue, and mustard yellow pigment.
Whereas the multi-part glass installation is titled ‘A witch is more lovely than thought in the mountain rain’ after a poem by Joan Murray, three sculptures from Horn’s ‘Key and Cue’ series feature the first lines of poems by Emily Dickinson, to whom Horn has dedicated various bodies of work.
Together the works in To Name the Light offer an excavation, a dissection, a dispersion and deciphering of time and history––personal, shared, and that of painting. Previously, Beltrán described the interplay between chosen combinations of colors as “panels of code;” rather than representing an image, they comprise a distinct visual language, replete with numerous possibilities for imagery.