Dot Fiftyone Gallery

Dot Fiftyone is delighted to present Graciela Hasper “The Resonance of Dreams”, her second show at the gallery. It comprises a selection of new works that include paintings, watercolors, ceramics, and site-specific installations.

Graciela Hasper’s watercolors are in the territory of intuition, where the creative possibilities of the intersection of shapes are explored, and the chromatic invention, with its combinations, is displayed. They are not sketches, although it is certainly possible to relate several of her watercolors to specific pieces of work. Rather, they are studies of invention, where subjectivity holds sway, though it may not prevail over the constructive reasoning that is shown unhesitatingly in her acrylics… Each watercolor offers itself independently to the viewers: they may linger over the transparencies and the impressions left by the brushstrokes or on the sometimes-fuzzy fields of color at the border of the line as a result of water. The objectivation of large-format canvases is the denial of the immediacy of the watercolors in their execution as well as in their observation.

The earliest painting selected for this exhibition is from 2000. It presents a dynamic pattern, different from one in recent pieces, with a white background and small gray and colored oval shapes that encourage the viewer to look in multiple  oblique directions. In a painting from the following decade, the orange color field sets up a precise limit so that the sequence, as an act of papyrology, may take place at its center. Her recent paintings emphasize this reflective process within the geometric system (from the modern avant-garde to the contemporary neo-geometric movements); each piece is supposed to display a unique formal relation, always from the paradox of an objective painting, that is both emotional in its perception as well as playful.

The specific dimension of color is set in a well-balanced manner, leaving out any hint of violent gesturing to favor chromatic subtlety at the points of contact between shapes, among which the curved ones prevail. It is the reclaiming of clear and jubilant art that accepts universality without losing the connection to the regional genealogy of expansive painting in space or with the appeal to a viewer’s senses. From then on, it will not abandon the mystical framework or the angst before the absolute, which is one of the sensitive sources of abstraction.

Her projects in public spaces and the specific large-scale pieces complement what was left unfinished of the modern project: to create the necessary conditions for a new vision. When she eliminates the separation between art, design, and everyday life, Hasper is not trying to connect the image to the urban dynamics from the perspective of geometry and color, but rather, she is trying to establish the moment of perceptive isolation in which beauty helps the viewers snap out of their alienation. In this exhibition, she offers a specific impression, originating from her digital work, which recovers in a more elaborate way the explorations of the colored line drawings of the geometric shapes on large white backgrounds she  made in 2001, where beauty arose as a social necessity in the midst of social collapse. While working the modes and frames allowing flexibility, Hasper is thinking about the possibility of shape as a space modifier, as an aesthetic of an abstract montage, well executed in the suspended “drops of color” that complement the idea of the viewer’s participation.

Simultaneously with her paintings and installations, Hasper  worked in ceramics in recent years. Some of those pieces can be associated with the geometrical and precarious shapes found in her watercolors, isolated in their volumes. Perhaps, the musicality of color in them — a feature of her aesthetic tenet — acquires the resonance of dreams that brings about the return to the origins of civilization.