Teo González, 23.4837K
A Solo Exhibition of New Paintings

September 13 – October 11
Opening reception: Saturday, September 13, 6-8PM

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Teo González, 23.4837K, the artist’s third solo exhibition with Irvine Contemporary, Opening reception with the artist, Saturday, September 13, 6-8PM.

Teo González extends his signature approach to process, organic form, and the color values of his very specific pigments in a new series of paintings with gold pigment on various grounds as well as new paintings in the artist’s current color compositions. The title of the exhibition, 23.4837K, represents a playful and hypothetical karat value (K) of the gold pigment used in the paintings, a number which represents the impossibility of achieving the “pure value” of 24K, or 100% gold. 23.4837K is a symbol of limits, imperfections, and the reality of worldly matter for an artist whose work has sought ideal harmonies.

Throughout his career as a painter, González has worked out his own distinctive synthesis of three major traditions of modern and contemporary painting: minimalism and conceptual abstraction, process and the exploration of materials opened up by post-minimalist art, and color field painting, where color and the materiality of colors are treated as subject matter. When he began his explorations toward a new way of painting over fifteen years ago, González used very finely drawn grids to demarcate both the scale of drops he would use and the quantity of organic disruptions he could register. He has abandoned the grid--the idea of squares within squares defining a plane surface—and now allows patterns of drops to form waves and rhythms of space bounded only by the edges of the painting support.

González’s approach to the reduction of form and medium is now well-known: he allows very painterly, time-bound and process-driven drops of highly saturated pigments in diluted acrylic medium to take their own organic shapes on the surface of a painting, almost always a square. His paintings become pictures of life disrupting the “pure” abstract geometry of squares and grids. An important dimension of González’s philosophy of painting is the awareness of color right down to the specific materiality of the pigment. He has also been driven by a quest to find specific pigments that represent “classical” saturated color values (like carbon black, titanium white, Cadmium red, Prussian blue, cerulean blue), but pigments that need to work in the medium and on surfaces in the very exacting ways that the artist wants to capture.

In talking about his process and exacting choice of pigments, Teo and I have joked that his paintings are about the “physics of paint.” He’s always testing pigments and getting them to behave. It always comes down to brush, pigment, medium, and exacting skill. Do it, repeat, do it again until you have a painting.

González’s new series of works push the artist’s mastery of the “physics of pigment” to the limits. He has to pause at the threshold of a “pure” color value and a “pure” pigment. With gold, González discloses a paradox, the limit case of color, a limit case of art: pure gold doesn’t exist, and if it did it would be unusable. All gold has alloys, and the impurities in the alloy allow gold to be shaped by an artist, even as pigment. It’s also a cliché that all great art is flawed, imperfect, revealing the hand of the artist and human limits. González’s paintings of great beauty and wonder have often seemed to imitate an alchemist’s desire to transform base materials into something higher. Having achieved gold, the artist now finds himself in the role of a reverse alchemist, using gold to disclose other wonders in the time-bound, imperfect, and very human world where art lives and moves and has its being.

-Martin Irvine

About the Artist

Teo González was born in Zaragoza, Spain, and after completing his art education in Spain and California, now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work is in the collections of major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The San Diego Museum of Art, The National Gallery (Washington, DC), and the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, DC). González also had solo exhibitions in New York City and Seoul, Korea in 2008. Irvine Contemporary has published a catalog of González’s works with essays by Jonathan Binstock (former Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art) and Martin Irvine (Irvine Contemporary). Copies are available from the gallery.

| Exhibition announcement in pdf | Artist's resume |