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ARTURO HERRERA |
Chicago-based, Venezuelan-born artist Arturo Herrera has said he wants viewers to respond to his work in “an unexpected pattern of their own making.” His complex collage-based imagery offers a rich breeding ground for such responses. By combining figurative elements from cartoons and coloring books with the Modernist, gestural abstraction, Herrera’s work functions almost like an artistic Rorschach test. Fragments of images from popular culture are subsumed by layers of abstract forms resulting in what the artist calls “… the effect of non-linear and associative readings on the viewer…,” designed to provoke visual and psychic memories of childhood.
Untitled is related to a huge wall painting Herrera made for an exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy in the summer of 2003. The original painting was fifty feet long and was on a wall between two windows overlooking a landscape. Herrera transformed the wall painting into this diptych, which is made from painted and hand cut paper. The imagery is from a group of cut-outs and drawings he made based on a combination of paint splatters and Disney cartoons. At first, the forms appear to be a tangled web of dripped and splattered green paint; however, closer inspection reveals the outlines of images the artist appropriated from Walt Disney’s animated Snow White – hats of dwarfs, a cartoon-like landscape of trees and grass, and even Snow White herself. Combining high and low culture, Herrera’s cut-out version of the venerated drips and splatters of Abstract Expressionism draws viewers in to reveal the vernacular imagery buried there. This unlikely pairing of childhood fantasy and Modernist abstraction taps into the adult unconscious in ways that are unpredictable and personal to each viewer.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects