Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to present Gustavo Díaz: Confronting Silence, the gallery's third solo exhibition for contemporary artist Gustavo Díaz [b. 1969, Argentina / Lives in USA]. The exhibition features twelve new pencil drawings and four sound works (Brownian Flights), and is accompanied by a curatorial text written by Nikki Moore, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Arts at Wake Forest University. Díaz's "Semantic Constellation," a schematic diagram mapping the scientific, philosophical, and creative exploration that was the impetus for this new body of work, will also be on view in the gallery.
Born and raised in Argentina, Gustavo Díaz was awarded a scholarship to work at the National Industrial Technology Institute at an early age. In the 1990s, he studied painting and sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón, and piano performance at the Conservatorio Superior de Música Manuel de Falla. For twelve years, Díaz...committed himself to the teaching of art. He subsequently spent ten years in almost complete isolation in the remote town of Cariló, Argentina, where he continued to investigate contemporary scientific and philosophical thought through artistic research. In 2017, Díaz relocated to Houston, Texas, where he currently lives and works.
Throughout his artistic career, Díaz has explored the behavior of complexity, presenting his findings through intricate, abstract works that map the conceptual connections between disparate, yet related, theories. His new series of drawings marks a return to his use of graphite on paper, and his employment of the simplest media to explore some of the most abstract and complex concepts in his work to date. While Díaz's lines evoke strokes of a brush, no paint ever touched the delicate paper. Nor did any erasers. Instead, Díaz meticulously builds up his drawings through manual techniques and an arsenal of pencil leads. The shapes are crafted with miniscule lines and hard points and no blending, but the effect is of a dynamic cloud. Motion in this series often runs counter to a visual reading of classic art. As soon as your eyes land on one focal point, they may linger on the lacunae—absences—before rebounding to a new nexus. Díaz is a master of careful construction that feels organic.
As Moore notes, "Not a drawing of, but a drawing with, Díaz’ intricate works on paper bring the body into the service of differential equations and fuzzy logic. Choosing the somatic, the artist’s careful articulations of line, point, and gesture eschew the illusion of realism only to show us the world all the more profoundly. With Xenakis, Díaz maps fields of uncertainty and spontaneous synchronizations not only in music, but in the act of drawing itself. Lines that never connect form shapes that never truly appear.
These experiments are the notation and the model of micro-choreographies. They are footprints of the dance that is between body and pen. Between point and line. Between sound and silence.
Thirteen billion years on, we are still listening to the percussion of the Big Bang. In every moment. Perhaps inaudible in its ubiquity. Díaz’ work is a response to the subsequent silence. It is a glimpse of the instruments that tune and turn the body to it."
Díaz's work has been shown internationally, and is included in many notable private collections around the world, as well as the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum System of San Francisco (Legion of Honor, de Young Museum, & Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts), San Francisco, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX, USA; and The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, Houston, TX, USA, among others.
Entrada actualizada el el 21 abr de 2022
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