For this latest body of work, Cartagena spent time sifting through landfills on the outskirts of Mexico City to collect thousands of discarded photographs—portraits, snapshots, and tourist views. Cartagena excises figures, faces, or other details from the found photographs and reconfigures the original compositions by either moving the cut fragments or removing them entirely. The altered photographs remain strangely whole and strikingly familiar, compelling the viewer to consider what gives a photograph meaning. His arrangements reveal that seemingly crucial aspects of an image are both central and incidental to our ability to understand the works.

Cartagena is producing works of art specifically for this exhibition, giving visitors to the Eastman Museum the first opportunity to see the newest photographs in his most recent body of work.

StudioSession-849
Alejandro Cartagena (Mexican, b. Dominican Republic, b. 1977). Detail from Narciso / Narcissus, 2019. Altered gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist. © Alejandro Cartagena

About the artist

Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, in northeastern Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. His work has been exhibited internationally and is part of public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the George Eastman Museum.

Cartagena is also a self-publisher and co-editor of photobooks and has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, Le Monde, and the New Yorker. He is the recipient of several awards, including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Lente Latino award in Chile, and the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome.

ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA: PHOTO STRUCTURE / FOTO ESTRUCTURA
January 31, 2020 – June 28, 2020
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA: PHOTO STRUCTURE / FOTO ESTRUCTURA
January 31, 2020 – June 28, 2020
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY

Framing Specifications

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 114
Type: Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: unfinished ash frame
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame
Custom Wood Strainer: 1/2″ wood frame strainer

Connally works most clearly with what we recognize as gestural abstraction, associated with Abstract Expressionism. Connally has focused, however, on a notable subset of such gestural painting, one recognized in the heyday of Action Painting and even cited then to link Abstract Expressionism with vital precedents (e.g. the late Impressionism of Monet, the early abstractions of Kandinsky). Like such precedents, Connally distinguishes herself as, in essence, a landscape painter, albeit one who paints the landscape she feels as much as she paints the one she sees. Indeed, Connally’s stress on sensuous form and color experience through reference to natural phenomena (in particular vegetation and water, normally in motion) places itself squarely in a tradition particular to the American experience. John Marin’s expansive rhapsodies on the local landscape exemplify this tradition, as does Joan Mitchell’s gradual – but ultimately thorough – adoption of landscape qualities and references. This sort of “plein air abstraction” defines Connally’s work, but her particular touch and palette, and her close and vibrant sense of atmosphere, distinguishes it.

Peter Frank, LA Art Critic

Connie Connally, Tigers on the River Bank, 2019, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Connie Connally Windflower II 2019 30×30 oil on canvas

Connie Connally, Rose Garden, oil on canvas,30 x 30 inches

About the artist

Connie Connally paints stunning canvases of complex elegance, with imagery that merges harmoniously and nearly completely both representational reference and powerful abstraction. Connally’s poetic colorscapes, with their expressive brushwork, sweeping gestural marks and animated cadence, reflect the artist’s passion for distilling the essence of her observations of nature and situate her work as the vital interplay between memory and imagination. Her palette of organic color and calligraphic brushstroke combine to serve as imprint of the artist’s profound love of being in nature and the desire that her painting reflect both her exterior and interior experience of it.

Citing Joan Mitchell as an important influence on her work, Connally employs exuberant, impassioned colors laid on her canvases in a pictorial strategy that teeters between the action painting of her abstract expressionist forebears and a more refined personal style that modulates the strokes and dabs that comprise her surfaces. Her layers of brushstroke read less as agitated ruptures and more like intuitive, sensual experiences rendered as prismatic atmospheres of color and tone. Rich, multi-layered surfaces of color morph, coalesce and scatter in quietly energetic rhythms that evoke the experience of being surrounded by nature.

Connie Connally

Wild By Nature

January 11, 2020 – February 15, 2020

George Billis Gallery

Los Angeles, CA

Framing Specifications

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Deep Floating Profile: 121
Type: floating frame for 1-1/2″ deep painting
Wood & Finish: unfinished maple
Purchasing Option: joined frame
Framing Advice: Fitting Floating Frames