Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light
Lehmann Maupin, London
May 14 – June 22, 2024
Sculpture is durational in a way that painting is not. Painting can be observed in a glance, whereas sculpture has to be explored in time and space. I try to bring this sculptural animation to my wallworks while keeping that “glance” effect of painting. Painting is like a container where everything compresses into this one thing, whereas sculpture expands into more ambiguity.—Loriel Beltrán
Lehmann Maupin presents To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist LORIEL BELTRÁN (b. 1985). Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time––geological, biological, historical, linguistic––as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality. This exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by curator Katherine Rochester.
Loriel 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. Loriel Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers (1888-1976), whose exacting investigation of chromatic interaction expanded the possibilities for modern color theory. Albers asserted that “as basic rules of language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over.” Loriel Beltrán has developed his own chromatic language that also incorporates an element of chance in the interplay between material viscosity, gravity, and time. The resulting images are prismatic, as though color and light are emanating from every visual cut / break in the 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. Seemingly frozen in a transitional state of becoming and disintegrating, between representation and abstraction, the painting is composed of striated sections of typically discordant pigments––vibrant blues, reds, greens, and yellows are placed next to areas of deep maroons and browns, next to pastel pinks, purples, and blues––to surprising and sometimes technicolor effect. 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?’” For Loriel Beltrán, it seems that what remains is an endless set of possibilities in the undefined space of perception.
While Total Collapse draws from the artist’s own personal painting history, other works in the exhibition, like Sulfur Aerosol, 2024 and Dark Path / Dark Past, 2024, skillfully traverse art history by exploring the genre of landscape painting, drawing inspiration from the legacy of early 19th-century Romantic painters such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. 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 Loriel 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, Loriel Beltrán depicts an acidic skyscape composed of layers of cotton candy pink, baby blue, and mustard yellow pigment. The surface of the painting vibrates with an alluring and ominous intensity, invoking in the viewer a similar sense of overwhelm to that induced by contemplation of the rapidly advancing effects of climate change. For Loriel Beltrán, the work is open to a variety of interpretations. He explains, “It has a toxic but seductive quality, the kind we usually get from technology and the idea of ‘progress’ and our curiosity for the next thing.”
In Dark Path / Dark Past Loriel Beltrán depicts a night scape that is created through an ombre effect––deep maroon transitioning into deep verdant green. Throughout, there are hints of bright yellow, blue, purple, and pink that suggest a scattering of objects, debris, or perhaps even people. The title alludes to the dark path / past of humanity, one marked with a violence that has had an irreparable impact on the landscape. Here as with the other works in the exhibition, Loriel Beltrán employs the language of abstraction to grapple with the complexity of human history, the vastness (and incomprehension) of the natural world, and indescribable physical experience of light and color. What captivates him, especially, is the profound connection between color––a manifestation of light––and its ties to substances originating from the sun, extracted from minerals, and developed into pigments.
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, Loriel 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. Loriel Beltrán transforms the code into a rich repository of accumulated knowledge, experience, memory, and signification.
LEHMANN MAUPIN
1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, SW7 2JE London
