In old Tibet it was considered that childhood ended at 7 and the first steps and training of adult life would then begin. Shie Moreno's early years were spent in a Havana society in the throes of a Stalinist period amid the decaying splendor of a once grand city. At 8 he endured a crowded, nightmare passage forever known as the Mariel boatlift. He arrived in a hostile city to a foreign culture. The family quickly moved to Los Angeles and then, years later, returned to Miami.
The harsh bright light of the tropics, the intensity of color, the forced blindness of night in a crowded vessel, the elements, the sense of drifting and of place, all served to forge the sensibility of an artist.
A fascination with iconography, calligraphy and the strength of titles is also evident in the artist's work. He strives for the clarity of "morning water drawn from an undisturbed spring" (Quotations from: 'Orin Orisa - Songs for Selected Heads - Copyright 1992 John Mason).
The phrases and deeper meanings of Yoruba spirituality as lived by the Lukumi sing throughout his life. A sense of command comes from "the proposer who wields the sceptre" and "the owner of rivers and life". Marrying the strength of titles and the formalism of calligraphy Shie Moreno brings dust to life with the breath of a divine creator in the form of pigment to canvas or other media on the surface to hand.
The artist has summoned forces and unleashed them as animating spirits, elementally free and giving freely. Shie Moreno is a living tendril connecting ancient spirituality, the fecund tropics and contemporary American art.
The artist is not hindered by material constraints; any surface and material will do for creating expression. Paint, collage, tar, marker, wax, aerosol, keepsakes and even fire will be used to create a surface effect on canvas, wood, paper or glass. An earnest examination of color, letter forms and composition inform the work. This leads to Shie Moreno as an inventor of forms, ever expanding the techniques and range of his expression.
He is a superb draftsman with an organic sense of color who chooses to work in the forms he creates. Early series reveal his skill at drawing as well as his wit. As an example is his graphite and mixed media work where the half portrait of an elegant woman looks like a manipulated photographic image but is entirely drawn by hand.
Any artist, particularly one as attuned as Shie, is also an instrument subject to the confluence of diverse energies; cultural, geographic, temporal and those not subjugated to the constraints of time.
Open to these influences, Shie Moreno's show 'New Paintings 2009' presented a response to the times that is a form of commentary that is also an end to commentary and marks a change of movement in the music of his work. The artist has been exhibiting in galleries for close to twenty years.
The news is of war and decline, a collective obsession with collapse and the end of things. The artist responds with organic images such as 'Butterfly Dreams' or the exercise in roseate hues 'Birds and Bees' and with grand works in the Eternal Drifter series. The latter, a 72" x 144" triptych on large wooden panels, 'Eternal Drifters III', as well as the smaller triptych on paper 'Abyssal Empire' are abstracted organic forms without beginning or end, alive and adrift in eternity, indifferent to the viewer but rewarding attention. It is unclear if the organic elements are suspended in air or water or other but one sense comes through clearly, life is alive and adrift in space, the fleeting now is also eternal.
There are recurring motifs and an evolution in the technique with which they are used. A pattern on a curved surface is used in the large double panel painting 'Africana'that appears with more sophistication and painterly brio in 'Mundo Nuevo' and finally in a mastery of effect and technique that shows no effort in 'Eternal Drifters III'.
In his body of work are also found delicate nature studies executed with great sensitivity as in his portrait 'Heron' or his study of fish in a pond 'Koi', as well as religious iconography as in his 'Santa Barbara' paintings.
Finally, there is a fluid command of design, color and form done with a swing that is his own. Even the 20th Century graphic design of militant politics is defanged by being rendered at a remove and set free to be. The drums are sounding. Shie Moreno's heat is cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment