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Review of art exposition at Jadite Galleries, New York, November 2002.
Luis Casaravilla: Gesture Tempered by Geometry Often the development of an artist's style must go through several phases before arriving at its most mature expression. Luis Casaravilla, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts, and now resides in Washington D.C., started with abstraction and surrealism. Subsequently, he worked his way through collage and periods of representation, before completing the circle of aesthetic growth with the abstract paintings for which he is known today, many of which are in private collections around the world. A veteran of several successful solo shows in Uruguay and the U.S. who also participated in the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy, Casaravilla's most recent solo show, "New Works", was seen at Jadite Galleries, 413 West 50th Street, a venue which has distinguished itself by introducing some of the most interesting artists from Latin America to the New York art scene. What immediately struck one about Casaravilla's exhibition was its stylistic diversity, kept skillfully in check by an overriding harmony. As well as any painter at work today, Casaravilla proves that a true style can be determined by a strong individual character, rather than by the selfconscious, superficial superimposition of habitual motifs to establish a recognizable stylistic signature. This recognition on the part of the painter allows him to move freely from gestural compositions, created with energetic, seemingly impetuous brush strokes, to more stringently organized geometric canvases, as the spirit moves him. Because his formal explorations are governed by a singular sensibility, his wide-ranging approaches to form and color are invariably brought into harmony by his painterly authority. Even at his most spontaneous, Luis Casaravilla is an artist who always knows exactly what he is doing. Thus his untitled abstractions comprised of bold, serpentine strokes of color that project a sense of untrammeled energy work perfectly in concert with other paintings, such as Construction II, which are considerably more geometric. While the latter canvas is essentially abstract, it alludes to urban architecture and its composition is created with overlapping rectangular forms. These forms stand in sharp contrast to the flowing, sensual, curvaceous shapes seen in many of Casaravilla's more recent acrylics on canvas, with their dynamically writhing compositions. Yet for all their contrasts with his more austerely composed works, these new paintings succeed so splendidly by virtue of Casaravilla's ability to temper their gestural freedom with an underlying sense of structure and depth. In one untitled abstraction, variegated strokes of blue, green, and white are interwoven with a broad brush to create a composition so muscularly compressed that it seemingly threatens to explode the canvas from its stretcher bars (click here to view). By contrast, in another untitled gestural abstraction, vibrant red, blue, and yellow hues laid down in contrastingly loose strokes suggest a lyrical chromatic shower (click here to view). Yet another painting is composed with intricately braided, ribbon-like color areas that are at once rhythmic and precise in a manner that tempts one to risk redundancy and term them Neo-Futurist (click here to view). Whatever one wishes to call the paintings of Luis Casaravilla, however, they are impressive for their synthesis of freedom and structure, sensuality and austerity. His recent exhibition at Jadite Galleries showed Casaravilla at the top of his form. Maurice Taplinger |
