color block: hard edge sculptures

Updated: Feb 7, 2023

After one year of collecting materials from locals, sourcing different surfaces, keeping cut outs, irregular shapes, non recyclable and remodeling them and creating illusion, i wanted to give one last chance to all cut outs, the last cut. It started in the studio randomly layering some cut outs and seeing the potential of them as -negative space- shapes. It changed my usual process of symmetry and harmony, and starting to create rhythm and breathing in the composition. Cut outs became a shape itself and instead of painting new fields, i was chasing cuts to coexist, overlay, be even more reductive. Trying every time to introduce new color harmony, letters and new dynamics.

I was comfortable in filling an area, and didn't realize that I would be reacting to the surface and therefore angles.

By changing the process, working with "broken angles", pieces left from previous sculptures or found objects, The angles would come from within.

The colors would create different rhythms by their surface, as a collage and question the viewer if it was a painting or a sculpture.

Also considering the Architecture side of it, building a shape from 3D surfaces bring something completely different to the notion of painting.

Usually by drawing, i would create illusion of perspective, impossible geometry or symmetry in the canvas or shape.

Colors leading the shape and thinking how to create a new dynamic within.

4 pieces can include different colors, patterns, angles, and shapes.

which also means that the first reflection on that body of work was shape oriented and then colors came as a reaction from the dialogue between all shapes.

Colors are covering all surfaces, geometric patterns and create a new color harmony just by themselves.

Using borders to reunite pieces, as a puzzles, sculpture become like a bas-relief of colors that display color block geometric harmony.

The fun part about this project is to think that what use to be a negative space from a previous work, suddenly becomes a new side of colors.

Looking at each color block sculpture as some new harmony that i will use in new work, drawings or digital abstract, and painting.

Few definitions to understand the references

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Benjamin

Lorser Feitelson
Frederick Hammersley
June Harwood
Helen Lundeberg
John McLaughlin

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas.[1] Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.[2]

Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective (non-representational) compositions. Although the genre was popularized by avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century, similar motifs have been used in art since ancient times.

Josef Albers
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Mino Argento[4]
Hans Arp
Rudolf Bauer
Willi Baumeister
Karl Benjamin
Max Bill

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."[1]

During the late 1950s and 1960s, color field painters emerged in parts of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States, particularly New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature.[2]