Colombian's Landscapes Bluntly Elemental
By RICHARD HUNTINGTON, published in The Buffalo News on Wednesday, July 29,1992
One of Alejandro Gutiérrez's little pictures is dominated by what might be the world's tallest hay stacks - three shaggy mysterious heaps the color of a good mulch. The title gives it away - the heaps are "Tres Lomas/Three Hills." But who needs the title anyway? lt is Gutiérrez's special magic to be able to take the most indefinite mounds, add a piece of streaked and scraped "sky," sneak in some vaguely glowing orb and come up with a startlingly moving and full landscape. In the case of "Three Hills" we have something like a mountain range leaping skyward toward a dim, haunting sun. lt is utterly simple yet somehow complete in mood and scale.
Gutiérrez, a Colombian artist studying in Buffalo, is marvelously adept at such landscape transformations. Though from South America, he might still be related to the American landscape tradition that runs from Albert Pinkham Ryder to Arthur Dove. Dove, especially. Gutiérrez's rough drawn triangles, arches and circles seem to have a close kinship to the landscape symbolism of that early 20th century American.
The saving grace here may be that Gutiérrez seldom succumbs to obvious reductive abstraction. Enamoured as he seems to be with modernism, he must be constantly tempted to whack out a pleasing "modem art look" and add a few personal touch.
Cordillera Herida/Wounded Mountain Range
Oil Enamels/Sand on Canvas, 140 x 58 in (3.56 x 1.47 m)
But in his best works - the splashy watercolors and more worked-up oil stick paintings - he always maintains intimate emotional contact with his subject. He doesn't pare down - or fancy up, for that matter - just for the sake of visual liveliness or abstract harmony. Any reduction seems to come out of emotional necessity. The forms are often bluntly elemental, like those of children's picture-writing. "Hemisferio/Hemisphere" is a bold symmetrical image with explosive edges. The paint swings in tune with the "hill" and then suddenly pulls up at the edges, spilling blot and blobs and blobs in the process.
Untitled 35 - Watercolors on Rag Paper
30 x 40 in (76.2 x 101.6 cm) - private collection
An impressive still life painting "Duraznos y Peras/Peaches and Pears" employs similar methods. But here the artist also reaches across the limits of subject matter. This simple peach and pear could just as well be a landscape - a boulder on a rough meadow (the peach); an odd stub of a tree cut off too soon in the spring (the pear). Or then the invitation is there to see these two shapes as surrogates for bodies and gender - one a blurred, secretive opening, the other a hairy-edged upright.
Peaches & Pears/Duraznos y Peras
Watercolors on Rag Paper - 30 x 40 in (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Sometimes Gutiérrez seems a little over-directed by his subject matter. In the one big oil enamel in the show he reduces a mountain and sky vista to a quasi-natural outline and then tries to activate this flat somewhat banal image by a lot of tiny, furious happenings within the paint itself. At this point in his career he's better when he opts for a spontaneous approach. Watercolor more or less forces an artist to discover and reinvent as he goes along. At the moment it is in this medium that Gutiérrez seems most at home.
But this doesn't preclude the artist eventually finding his way in the "slower" media. For now Gutiérrez is seesawing between two kinds of landscape - the open spontaneous kind of the watercolors and the more thoroughly conceived sort of the enamels and oil sticks. Eventually the two extremes will likely meet. RH.
Cordillera en Llamas/Burning Mountain Range
Oil Enamels on Canvas - 110 x 56.75 in (2.79 x 1.44 m)
The two works below, acrylics on rag paper, included in the show, were executed while the artist was still pursuing his bachelor’s degree. They are now in private collections. Most of the pieces in this show sold. AGP.
