LORIEL BELTRÁN’S CHROMATIC LANGUAGE IN LEHMANN MAUPIN
Lehmann Maupin presents To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist Loriel Beltrán. Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work Total Collapse (Miami / Seoul), 2024, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time––geological, biological, historical, linguistic––as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality.
Beltrán has become known for his sculptural accumulations that poetically combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Employing custom-made molds and layers of paint, each work is produced through a meticulous process of pouring, embedding, compressing, drying, slicing, and finally assembling each vibrantly pigmented cross section into an abstract composition. Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers (1888-1976), whose exacting investigation of chromatic interaction expanded the possibilities for modern color theory. Albers asserted that “as basic rules of language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over.” Beltrán has developed his own chromatic language that also incorporates an element of chance in the interplay between material viscosity, gravity, and time. The resulting images are prismatic, as though color and light are emanating from every visual cut / break in the composition.
Together the works in To Name the Light offer an excavation, a dissection, a dispersion and deciphering of time and history––personal, shared, and that of painting. Previously, Beltrán described the interplay between chosen combinations of colors as “panels of code;” rather than representing an image, they comprise a distinct visual language, replete with numerous possibilities for imagery. Beltrán transforms the code into a rich repository of accumulated knowledge, experience, memory, and signification.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by curator Katherine Rochester.
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LORIEL BELTRÁN Total Collapse (Miami/Seoul), 2024 Latex paint on panel 84 x 138 inches 213.4 x 350.5 cm © Loriel Beltrán
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Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light Installation View May 14–June 22, 2024 Lehmann Maupin London Photo by Lucy Dawkins
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Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light Installation View May 14–June 22, 2024 Lehmann Maupin London Photo by Lucy Dawkins
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Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light Installation View May 14–June 22, 2024 Lehmann Maupin London Photo by Lucy Dawkins
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Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light Installation View May 14–June 22, 2024 Lehmann Maupin London Photo by Lucy Dawkins
To Name the Light. Exhibition by Loriel Beltrán.
Until June 22nd, 2024.
Lehmann Maupin. 1 Cromwell Place. South Kensington, SW7 2JE London, United Kingdom.
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