Carlos Estrada-Vega

Geoform is an online scholarly resource and curatorial project whose focus is the use of geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art being made by artists from around the world.

Geoform explores, documents and celebrates the rich diversity of style and aesthetic intent that characterizes this broad vein of contemporary non-objective abstraction. Such diversity attests to the profound resonance that geometric form and structure have had for people across time and place.

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In this post I'm looking at construction, physical and compositional. Carlos Estrada-Vega and Gregory Johnston build their paintings from multiple elements. Harriet Korman constructs hers from geometric compositional elements, while Max Gimblett creates a flat painting on a sculptural form.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, whose work opens this post, builds his paintings block by painted block. There's a small magnet at the back of each block, and Estrada-Vega creates grids by the placement of the blocks. It's not an interactive painting--he places them as he wants them--but the manner of construction is sculptural (also a bit like quiltmaking.)

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The matter-of-fact blank stare of the modernist grid peers back out at the viewer, blocking his or her view into image space with an undeniably flat plane, reiterating the two dimensionality of the painting surface. A consistently reoccurring item in painterly discourse, it asks us to investigate beyond merely what one sees and to reach back into our own semblance of painting history.

The Hunterdon Art Museum is located in a 19th Century stone building that began life as a grist mill. MoMa it’s not—but then MoMA doesn’t have a river and waterfall outside its front door, either. About an hour west of Manhattan in Clinton, New Jersey, this solid, four-story building provides an unlikely but lovely environment for contemporary art, specifically Material Color, the subject of this post. The thick walls and shuttered windows remind you of its former life, as do the wooden floors, massive beams and solid staircases. Looking up you see the remains of what was once a chute that sent materials from one floor to another. Looking out, you see the Raritan river.

In his indispensable little 2000 book, "Chromophobia," the British artist David Batchelor demonstrated the degrees to which the Western imagination since antiquity has displayed a profound fear of color, as an agent of moral contamination or a sensual sign of corruption. By contrast, Carlos Estrada-Vega is an artist who might easily regard the garishly painted statuary of Hellenistic Athens as superior to the supposed "purity" of the museum-bound Elgin marbles.

Carlos Estrada Vega's paintings make me drool. I could blame the effect on the paintings’ superficial resemblance to stacks of confections at a dulceria. But that association is itself a rationalization, an attempt to get a handle on the ineffable synaesthetic kick these works deliver.

What seems at first to be little more than a mosaic color study reveals itself to be much more complex. Cralos Estrada-Vega draws parallels between his meticulous process and the monastic life. His unique methodology puts a twist on the concept of painting as object.

The eye might gravitate to Carlos Estrada-vega's paintings for their vibrant color, but the mind latches on to them as curious puzzles to be figured out, decoded. Their format appears simple enough: All are compositions based on the modular unit of the square. Some squares pair up to form rectangles, some quadruple to form larger squares, set among the smaller.

Will abstract painting prove to have been just a 20th century folly?

No one knows yet, and that has made abstraction magnetic again as the century ends.

The work of Southern California painter Carlos Estrada-Vega at Brian Gross Fine Art reminds us that embodying color is one thing abstract painting can do uniquely well.