RHODE ISLAND
Nilton Cardenas: Living in Memory/Viviendo en Memoria
Gallery Z • Providence, RI • www.galleryzprov.com
Nilton Cardenas, Tocando la Luz/Touching the Light, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 18". |
Color comes from the gods in Peru, where it is valued with music and tradition in the pantheon of gifts. Nilton Cardenas conveys the role of color in his culture by weaving memories, observations, imagination, and experience with symbols and scenes that are presented in lush, brilliant hues and shades.
Cardenas, a native of Lima, Peru, who now lives in Providence, RI, blends elements of surrealism, realism, and abstraction in paintings and drawings of different sizes and formats. Collectively, the pieces work as a memory scrapbook and cultural travelogue, bridging the mythic, ancient past with his personal, contemporary vision.
Among the most compelling, are the paintings that lean toward the ethereal. The acrylic-on-canvas, Touching the Light, offers a misty, predominantly red and black-gray background, suggesting fire and smoke—elements of creation and destruction. A bar of gold, a color known to the Inca as “the sweat of the sun,” interrupts the field like a beam of sunlight decorated in Peruvian symbols. One of the artist’s recurring motifs, a dot containing a circle surrounding a smaller dot, perhaps representing an eye looking into the dimension, is included along with fantastical creatures of myth or invention.
A series of drawings rendered in colored pencil and India ink on Bristol board focus attention on color more selectively, generally highlighting one element within the work: a golden mask, a decorated vessel, a man’s red shirt, the sun in a yellow pinwheel design.
Another standout is the self-portrait, Nilton. The painting shows the artist surrounded by
a purple-blue haze, tinged with green and a touch of red. He’s dressed in traditional garb, wearing a hat that completely covers his face, playing what looks to be a musical instrument shaped and patterned in the style of one of his archetypal creatures. Here, Cardenas is almost phantom-like, disappearing into his own painting, which happens to be the final piece he created for the series.
It’s an eloquent end to the exhibition, the artist’s coda to the world of his birth, blood, and imagination. By fusing exquisite colors with evocative fragments of Peru’s natural and civilized landscape and heritage, Cardenas creates a visual story that blurs the lines between documentary and dream.
—Doug Norris
To continue reading this review in the October/November issue, you can subscribe to Art New England by clicking the "Subscribe" icon below, or purchase a copy at your local newsstand or book retailer. Additional questions? Call (617) 782-3008 and ask to be connected to our circulation department.
|
