ART CITIES: London-Loriel Beltrán

Loriel Beltrán creates sculptural accumulations of paint and color that defy traditional notions of artistic media. Poetically merging painting and sculpture, the artist states that his works “resist becoming images” and instead materialize color in its full complexity. Situating his work between the legacy of Latin American modernism and postwar p:ainting in the United States, Beltrán dissolves distinctions between image and object, surface and substance, plane and structure. While the artist considers perceptual effects, he remains equally invested in issues of materiality, process, and industry, foregrounding artistic labor and the residue it leaves behind.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work “Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul)”, 2024, the exhibition “To Name the Light” foregrounds Loriel Beltrán’s engagement with time (geological, biological, historical, linguistic) as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality. 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. Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers, 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.” 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. 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 to surprising and sometimes technicolor effect. For Beltrán, it seems that what remains is an endless set of possibilities in the undefined space of perception. While the exhibition 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 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. 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. In “Dark Path / Dark Past” 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, 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.

Photo: Loriel Beltrán, Total Collapse (Miami/Seoul), 2024,Latex paint on panel, 84 x 138 inches, © Loriel Beltrán, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 14/5-22/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/