Matias Cuevas | Like My Fire or The Heart of the Andes

October 25 – November 30, 2017

MATIAS CUEVAS

Like My Fire or The Heart of the Andes

October 25 – November 30, 2017

CUEVAS TILLEARD is proud to present Like My Fire or the Heart of the Andes, a solo installation by Matias Cuevas.

Partially inspired by a memory from the artist’s adolescence, brought back by looking at Frederic Church’s painting The Heart of the Andes during a random walk around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Matias Cuevas’s current exhibit expands on his exploration of the transformative power of light, the traditions of painting, and the everyday.

As a native of Mendoza, Argentina, Cuevas first felt a sense of autonomy exploring the rocky landscape of his hometown. Going on meandering walks, looking at the vanishing sunlight filter through the Andes while making a bbq with friends at dusk, or observing it emerge while dancing to The Doors around a bonfire with strangers at dawn were among his favorite things. Seeing how the mountains were slowly transformed, from irregular and intimidating rocky boundaries into smoother and animated cartoon-like shapes of flat color; experiencing firsthand the paradox of the transformative power of light, both physical and metaphorical; and feeling a powerful sense of infinite possibility and opportunity are some of the memories woven into Cuevas’s own identity and into the work in this exhibition.

Within the context of these memories as well as his personal interest in ideas of universality, chance, and value, Cuevas’s restrained - yet playful - performative process focuses on the gestures of mark making and their potential to become image. With a sense of direction as a starting point, Cuevas repeatedly splashes a mix of different flammable paint thinners on carpet and quickly sets fire to them, casting their contours onto the carpet in surprising and unexpected ways. Hovering between the abstract and the representational, his organic forms blur the gap between art historical ideas of the improvisational and the intentional, of the sublime and the ordinary, subverting expectations about abstract painting and his household material of choice.

The simplicity of Cuevas’s monochromatic color fields and all-over playful patterns aim to both contain and expand the viewers' perception, to catalyze personal experience or cultural baggage by providing the viewer with the necessary space to be an active part in the construction of the work’s meaning. Cuevas’s paintings with carpet continue to unfold the myth of their own creation, bringing us closer to the artist’s vision, and provoking us to find value and a sense of opportunity in our everyday experience.