Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Installation detail with wall painting, from “El Sujeto Debe Rotar Como el Sol/The Subject Must Rotate Like the Sun” Exhibit, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, December 2015.
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz is a Venezuelan artist working in California, who integrates North and South American ideologies and art in her painting and installation pieces. With a contemporary style, Soto-Díaz intermixes the strong freestyle brushwork and hard edges of California painters with the bold colors and formal shapes of Venezuelan artworks. She is arguably one of the pioneers of integrating of integrating these not-so-disparate art styles.
Soto-Díaz earned her MFA at Claremont College, where she studied with painter Karl Benjamin, who later referred her to Ruth Bachofner. Soto-Díaz’s art is now in museums both nationally and internationally, with a new series recently shown at Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Los Angeles. One can see an outstanding progression from Soto-Díaz’s older to newer work, with increasing dimension and rhythm that inspires the viewer’s vision to dance throughout the picture. Her installation work has had a clear effect on the paintings, whereby one is virtually drawn into the space of the painting in similar fashion to how one literally walks through one of her installations.
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“When I work with installation, I am responding to space,” explains Soto-Díaz. “When I make participatory and instruction-based projects, I activate abstraction’s collective potential; when I work in solo projects, I process particular information or texts. I am interested in using formal elements as a language to materialize ideas.”
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Partial installation view of “El Sujeto Debe Rotar Como el Sol/The Subject Must Rotate Like the Sun” Exhibit, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, December 2015.
In the large white canvas painting included in the her most recent series at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, titled “El Sujeto Debe Rotar Como el Sol” / “The Subject Must Rotate Like the Sun,” there is color hidden beneath the surface, revealing an underpinning of structures and sequencing. The materiality of the white painting is heightened through minimal fragments of color, with the sanding of the painting acting as a visible gesture that reveals time in layers. This is also accompanied by the precision of razor sharp hard-edge connecting lines that in turn extend from the painted lines on the wall, referencing the geometric abstraction of minimalism.
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, “Last Dance Before the Landfill” Installation at the Torrance Art Museum, August 2015. Photo: Gene Ogami.
While there is a mysterious presentation of object and space, each painting contains the underpinnings of structure, with ambiguous spatial dimensions emanating a strong presence. Says Soto-Díaz, “I’m invested in the formal elements of painting: composition, color, line, gesture, and what some call ‘Faktura’ – the quality of the object’s surface, the application of paint, the various properties of color and paint, and the degree to which the process can be revealed.”
In developing installations, Soto-Díaz considers the install an extension of the painting whereby a unique process ensues. For the paintings included in the installation, “Last Dance Before the Landfill”, created for the Torrance Art Museum, one observes a unique forcefulness of brushstroke formed into an abstract object. In essence, the totality of the image may remind us of a ship’s bow pushing against heavy waters.
“’Last Dance Before the Landfill’ is about our impermanent, shifting relationship with material stuff, but also about painting in space,” says Soto-Díaz .”The work began with objects I acquired through Orange County Craigslist. Throughout the month of Studio System, an experimental exhibit and residency at the Torrance Art Museum, I regularly checked the free and reduced listings, the curb alerts, the leftovers of Garage Sales, and created an installation that changed every day depending on what I found.”
For “El Sujeto Debe Rotar Como el Sol” / “The Subject Must Rotate Like the Sun,” Soto-Díaz approached the work with the formal practice of a painter and the intrigue of a poet. “I use as a point of departure the work of Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo to reflect on the limits of language and on the heterogeneous substance of the self, one that might require a multiplicity of inflections” says Soto-Díaz. “As a visual corollary to his heteronymic work, I use stylistic personae that are materialized differently in each of the works, from the heavily loaded brushes of impasto, to showing the fresh raw canvas, to the use of squeegees, wet on wet mixing, hard edges, electric sanding as a gesture, and so on.”
All images courtesy of the artist and Ruth Bachofner Gallery.
