TEO MONSALVE

Cyclical Time Portals is a series of painting/collage made out of recycled acrylic painting palettes. I have sliced through layers of 10 years of accumulated paint in a performative gesture that I call the artist as a miner. I enter this mine of colours and memories to extract pictorial moments encapsulated in layers o paint. The extraction process is long and demanding. I have developed a method to cut through the dried paint; I heat the pallets with a blow drier and for a few minutes until the acrylic becomes flexible. Then I use the cutter, which flows easier and by doing this it can be guided with an intention. Once the extraction phase is over I continue to do a taxonomic selection in which I select pieces by size, color and texture. The process of applied paint on these pieces shows us the other extreme of the possibilities of acrylic paint, I thin down the paint with water until the viscosity is lost and the paint is absolutely fluid. I work by layers, the drying process is long, I enjoy the extended periods of contemplation that the process allows, I tend to get los in between the textures that emerge in the mix of water and pigment. Once the backgrounds are dry I go on to the composition of the paintings. I have decided to make use of concrete geometrical figures as the main forms of the paintings. These concrete forms are populated by a multiplicity of pieces of dried paint placed in a mosaic nature. Is like this that the paintings are assembled, the brushstroke is replaced by matter, discarded matter that found a new cycle, matter that accumulates memory and time.

 

With these paintings I open a dialogue with the magnificent work of Jack Whitten and to his idea of painting as an object used to seduce matter. Every single piece of paint placed in these paintings are like an analogue microchip that stores information of specific pictorial moments. That means that is loaded with energy obtained by the manipulation of the material in the act of painting. “I communicate to the spirit through the ritual of work” Whitten used to say. What distance my paintings from the works of Whitten is that my paintings are made with recycled material. He used to apply industrial amounts of paint on to his canvases to achieve his paintings. My paintings use a minimum amount of new paint, which is diluted in water to an extreme. The rest is re used material, re-signified in a way resurrected.