WALDO BALART: CHROMATIC SYSTEMS
Opening reception Thursday October 25, 6-9 pm
Exhibition runs until November 24. Tuesday to Saturday 11-6 pm
Henrique Faria Fine Art is proud to present Waldo Balart’s first New York show in two decades, featuringkey works from the 1970s and 1980s.
Balart’s oeuvre is concerned with color, order, plane, space and time. His formal exploration ofabstraction and chromatic systems identify him as a concrete artist.
Having moved to New York in 1959, he quickly became involved with the artistic and intellectual milieu.His early interest in geometric painting took shape and strength when he heard about Josef Albers’classes at Princeton University. Albers introduced Balart to Bauhaus aesthetics, impacting his life andwork forever.
Balart also recognizes the enormous influence of artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian,not solely for their use of abstraction, but also for their consideration of art in spiritual terms.
Concrete artists viewed artworks as visual manifestations that do not symbolize or represent anythingother than what we see: lines, colors and shapes. The aim of these early abstract movements, an aimalso shared by Balart, is to create a visual language detached from the complexities of representationbased on essential elements of artistic creation.
Balart names one of his most important series Propositions, using a term of logic and philosophy, butalso as a suggestion of his goal: to offer a particular relationship between shape and meaning, withoutreferential content, that will provide the viewer with a path towards knowledge, meditation and fantasy.
In Balart’s series, The Chromatic Development of the Code of the Structure of Light, the artist expandshis interest in light and color by constructing a kind of an alphabet that approaches him to language andConceptual art. Balart begins each work within this series using a “color code”, dubbing it “CEL”, theSpanish acronym for what translates to “Code of the Structure of Light”. The CEL contains eight colors,which despite their different shades are all equal parts in the composition of light.
In so doing, Balart creates a type of language, using color as codes or symbols similar to other artistsassociated with Conceptualism such as Alejandro Puente, whom he met in the late 60s and 70s, as wellas Osvaldo Romberg and Sol LeWitt, who were also working in New York at that time.
For Balart, the interest in light and color is not only found in the formal qualities of painting or as alanguage, but in relation to the spirit, complete with the limitations of human perception to comprehendthe complexities of the world.
A simple walk through this exhibition is a submersion into a universe of color and shape that challengesnotions of perception and therefore questions our spiritual place in the world. It is the result of more than50 years of artistic and intellectual work.
Waldo Balart was born in Banes, Cuba in 1931. He studied economics and political science at Santo Tomásde Villanueva University in Havana, Cuba. As an amateur painter, he worked days as an accountant until1959 when he decided to leave Cuba and relocate to New York City. While in New York, he studied art atMoMA’s Art School from 1959 to 1962 and held his first show in 1961 at the RJ Gallery. During his years inthe city, he became friends with artists from the New York School and Pop art movements, acting in some ofAndy Warhol’s films. In 1968, he showed at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. He moved from New York to Madridin 1970. In 1972, he had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. He has had some 50solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions. Aside from being an artist, Waldo Balart has also publishedbooks and essays. Some of his publications include The Practice of Concrete Art: The European Society’sPath Toward Knowledge (2011) and a collection of essays which were published throughout Europe knownas Essays About Art (1993). Balart has traveled Europe throughout his lifetime and has lived in Madrid, Spainand Liège, Belgium. He currently lives and works in Madrid.