Homero Hidalgo

MFA Thesis Exhibition

NOT FOLLOWING THE PLOT

Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery

March 2 – 14, 2020

Reception: March 13, 6 – 8pm

I immigrated to the United States from Ecuador, my birthplace, as a teenager, leaving behind a developing character. The new culture forced me to discover similarities, like movies, music and comic books. Watching movies repeatedly, I found meaning in personalities and stories; I also learned the language and was provided with guiding principles and many other things. Although superficially unfamiliar, characters and stories transcended race, history and norms for me. I’ve constantly tried to decipher similarities between my two cultures; perhaps this is why my paintings are between abstraction and figuration, and could be thought of as an analogy.

Quixotically, I try to understand what an apple is in the way the great painter Cézanne asked that question. To understand painting in order to connect with humanity through it is a self-delusion that a supercilious character possesses; some painters are Don Quixote! But the tradition of painting has for me a special task: to capture contemporary time and reflect our contemporary light. To create my latest paintings, I actually use that light by projecting movies onto a canvas and pausing at random to trace forms and spaces. This system that creates disparate charcoal drawings aims to impact Painting in the way we all consume entertainment these days; to also represent technology with a procedure, and to saturate Abstract Painting with a cinematic space with modules of reflected light. As painters, we reproduce automatically how colors are calibrated around us, we are bound to the atmosphere, but we can choose what kind of light surrounds us. - Homero Hidalgo

Homero Hidalgo is an Ecuadorian-American abstract painter. The focus of Homero's artwork is a trial-and-error exploration of seemingly opposing forces: randomness vs. selection; geometric abstraction vs. direct expression; color as an illuminating agent vs. color as form and space; potentiality vs. actuality; and psychology vs. technology. To make his paintings, he devises systems to create new relationships between these juxtapositions. For example, the ancient Mandala pattern may serve as a device to hold and organize superimposed line drawings of screen grabs from binge-watched films. His work is included in the collections of the Snite Museum of Art and Denver Art Museum. His work has been featured in the poetry journal Caliban, and in Issue 132 of New American Painters. He was recently awarded a UNLV GPSA Sponsorship grant to support his thesis research and is a nominee for the Dedalus Foundation Award for Painting.