Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is pleased to present “Slow Rotations,” an exhibition of drawings and ceramic sculpture by mixed media artist Luis Roldán.
Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is pleased to present “Slow Rotations,” an exhibition of drawings and ceramic sculpture by mixed media artist Luis Roldán.
Slow Rotations - Solo Exhibition by Luis Roldán
Photos by Arthuro Sanchez
Opening reception September 6th, 6-8pm
September 6th - October 5th
Luis Roldán (born 1955) is a polymath Colombian artist who works across painting, installation, drawing, and sculpture. Trained as an architect and art historian, he is self-taught as an artist, appreciating the freedom that art gives him to explore questions of space, abstraction, and physicality His various bodies of work tend to look very different from each other, as he uses materials to mine their social, domestic, and political contexts, highlighting the artisanal qualities of his processes and ideas. Roldán lives and works between Bogotá and New York City; he exhibits internationally, and his works are held in major private and institutional collections across Latin America and the United States. In 2009 he represented Columbia at the 53 rd Venice Biennale. In 2017 he had a major career retrospective at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia.
Recently Roldán has explored the potential of ceramics. This current exhibition is a freewheeling improvisation/conversation between the two-dimensional gesture and its manifestation as three-dimensional form and volume.
Perception of an Object Costs Precisely the Object’s Loss (Essay by Gabriela Rangel)
Luis Roldan’s objects often elude categorization: a chair wipes out the traces of a body, a jar rejects the liquid, a vase undoes its ornamental pattern to become a moebius knot. Non-sculptures, these objects avoid labels and definitions to point out a hesitation between the sound and the sense. Despite their elegant torsion, curvy lines, perplexing chromatic qualities and combinations, and random imperfections, they don’t seem to replicate the fusions, pressures, ruptures and imprints of matter on matter that minerals or stones carry in their ageless constitution. Stones do not require any human intervention to be because they arrive from nature without any creative effort. By contrast, Roldan’s objects aim to emphasize their human nature and the constantly changing course in the creative process of making. Their potency is to claim that they are not stones or minerals but mere objects. Paradoxically, their oddity creates the illusion that they were the capricious product of nature.
Typically, these bizarre yet beautiful objects made of clay and kiln-fired with glossy or matte glazes, won’t provide meaning. Indeterminate, these objects stubbornly resist giving any further explanation about their poetic function. Moreover, they disclose the polemical terms of a general discrepancy between structure and material, materiality and function, method and form. But these forms that adopt chaotic, organic, and somehow colorful shapes always start with something familiar, a common ground: a handle, a strip, a fringe. They comply with rules of cohabitation that bring a legible principle through a recognizable constituent until everything falls into the cracks to remind us of their uselessness. The hand, the wheel and the clay slow down the clock to become objects that bring a grain of happiness and joy, soothing the coarse paths of life, making objecthood a function of silence.
Sculpture Space NYC- Center for Ceramic Art is a non-profit 501(3) (C) dedicated to promoting contemporary visual art focusing on the research and exploration of three -dimensional work with an emphasis towards ceramics. SSNYC-CCA‘s mission is to stimulate creativity, new ideas and collaboration in ceramics-based investigations. Artists, designers and craftspeople.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday: 2pm-8pm (appointment is not required)
our@sculpturespacenyc.com
We are located at 47-21 35th Street, Long Island City NY 11101, near the 33rd Street/ Rawson Street stop on the 7 train.
