Las Cosas que Pintan/Painting in an Expansive Field

The facade of the VERGE Center for the Arts tells as much about the contemporary gallery as does their newest show titled Las Cosas que Pintan/Painting in an Expansive Field. It's colorful. It's edgy. It catches you off-guard. The inside of VERGE and the main gallery space are just as off-putting.

Divided into two separate spaces (the better to showcase concurrent exhibits with) VERGE presents Las Cosas in the larger, more open space and a second, more intimate photography show in the smaller of the two exhibition halls.

The show itself, Las Cosas que Pintan, is exceptional. Featuring sound, video, and paper works by artists Juan Sorrentino and Miguel Arzabe, the show attempts to override conventions associated with medium, tradition and the human experience. Sorrentino and Arzabe investigate ideas concerning poetic gesture and how this idiom seems to affect and even influence viewer experience.

Sorrentino's sound-scapes titled Cuadros Sonoros deal entirely in the realm of conceptualization, drawing upon normative ideas about imagination, poetics, and description. In his sound-scapes the viewer does not in fact view, but listen. Each canvas is left blank except for the insertion of a single speaker from which the voice of a narrator (identified in the description) imparts a subjective visual description of an untitled painting. The listener is only told the physical attributes of the painting and from this rudimentary foundation develops his or her own image of the painting. Thus the work is dependent on the listener's imagination and his or her interaction with the piece in a way that is entirely alien to a viewer's interaction with a physically present painting.

Miguel Arzabe's works explore an wholly separate concept, using familiar materials in unfamiliar ways. Tubes, a stop-motion work projected onto the back of a separate, completed artwork, focuses on the materiality of paint in a very physical and real way. Paint is squeezed out from tubes in force and in an almost violent manner. The result is both cleansing and disturbing, straddling the line between needing to finish an action (borderline OCD) and an decontextualized close up of the act of emptying something to its complete end.

Both artists delve into the unfamiliar and seek to challenge what is and what is not art.

Unfortunately, for both artists the VERGE space seems to fight against these aims. The openness of the gallery destroys the intimacy so inherently necessary for this exhibition. For the sound-scapes, the terrible acoustic environment created by the vast expanse of open air diminishes the power of the voices. While this does force the listener to draw closer to the canvas, it also frustrates the listener. I could barely hear the voices and the room was practically empty when I visited VERGE. The poor or perhaps ambient lighting throughout the space makes the works dark and difficult to read. The colors are all muted by the overwhelming presence of shadow. The potential for VERGE's gallery space especially taking into consideration the vastness of the space, its high ceilings and towering walls, is endless. However, in executing Las Cosas que Pintan/Painting in an Expansive Field, these same characteristics seem to hinder the success of the show. 

That is not to say that Las Cosas que Pintan is not a successful show. Perhaps the point of the sparsity and the dark was to amplify feelings of disjunction to make way for Sorrentino and Arzabe's works. In this instance, the space cuts past expectations of the "white room" to make way for the disturbing and off collar works included in the show. The empty space reminds the viewer of the preciousness of experience and how infrequent those "human moments" that Sorrentino and Arzabe explore do actually occur.

Thus, the pieces are not foiled due to the supposed faults of the space, but venerated by the lack of disruptions and the overwhelming presence of attention.