LOS ANGELES — When folks focus on their understanding of the violence underlying the logic of latest United States society and capitalism, they usually level to a second of awakening, a time period after they began to see — and will now not unsee — the method the system operates.
Standing in entrance of artist Linda Arreola’s newest vary of summary works, I discovered myself switching between two views. One is what I might instantly see: the formal great thing about them, with sharp strains, daring colours, and compositions that construct from her early explorations in abstraction. As she notes in her artist statement, she’s drawn by the shapes of circles and squares to discover “the humble icons of a grand spirit.”
But in the warmth of 2020 to 2023, when so many people had been locked down, Arreola started to include phrases and architectural components into her artwork. It is that this second view of her work that caught me without warning. Drawing from Mesoamerican architectural kinds, she continues her explorations of abstraction however inserts phrases and phrases that, in my thoughts not less than, pithily describe the brutal logics round successful and ageism — U LOST I WON, LITTLE GRAY HAIRS, EYE ON PRIZE.
The artist’s latest physique of work, largely acrylic on canvas, makes up Linda Arreola: Abstract Wanderings from the LA Borderlands 2020–2023, on view this month at Avenue 50 Studios in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood. In “Uvalde Children” (2022), for instance, sturdy vertical strains and bins with dot matrices appear like the entrance to a gate or temple. But when the phrase “CHILDREN” emerges on both facet of the canvas, the composition begins to appear like the entrance to a college — the exact same one which police delayed entering as the shootings occurred.
In “U Lost / I Won” (2021), the 4 architectural home windows comprise X’s and O’s, like the kisses and hugs one may ship a defeated opponent. And “Dump” (2022) reads like a vertical flag, with grey, pink, yellow, and black channeling towards, properly, a dump. In the context of a present about the borderlands, it made me consider the city’s illegal dumping problem, which spiked throughout the pandemic. “Instead of the hopeful aspiration or spiritual contemplation of earlier works, these paintings are tuned into an anxious awareness of numbers, units, and amounts,” curator Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia writes in the exhibition catalogue. “Rather than meditate or swirl or come together, they triangulate, multiply, and accumulate.”
As I circled the gallery to soak up the artwork, I famous as soon as extra the forwards and backwards between appreciating their formal composition after which absorbing the small messages sprinkled in. I imagined Arreola wandering in her thoughts throughout lockdown, identical to me, looking and asking how such a brutal world might proceed, and why it’s so exhausting to unsee. If we perceive spirituality to incorporate the daring exploration of the shadows’ interplay with what’s on the floor, this subsequent stage of her work is simply as religious in my thoughts, maybe extra so.
Linda Arreola: Abstract Wanderings from the LA Borderlands 2020–2023 continues at Avenue 50 Studios (131 North Avenue 50, Highland Park, Los Angeles) by means of July 29. The exhibition was curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia.
