Artist: Louis Vega Treviño New Paintings Opening Reception: October 4 6-9pm

Artist: Louis Vega Treviño
New Paintings
Opening Reception: October 4
6-9pm

Exhibit From
October 4, 2019 –  January 18, 2020

Louis Vega Treviño (b. 1972, San Antonio, Texas) attended San Antonio College in 1990 where he studied Architecture and Art before working with Kell Munoz qArchitects as a designer from 1992-2000. In 2000 – 2012, Trevino opened his studio space, Circle Infiniti, with artist, Ben Mata. Currently has a working studio at Hausmann buildings. Trevino has enjoyed numerous exhibits in San Antonio and around the United Sates, including New York, Chicago, Houston and Austin. He has exhibited at Southwest School of Art, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, Unit B Gallery and Mexic-Arte Museum. Recently showed with Kenneth Noland, James Little and Cleve Gray at Rosenbaum Contemporary, “Color, Line, Form”.

Trevino’s works on paper include drawings on museum board, post-it-notes, and over 60,000 cocktail napkins, which he has translated to a variety of media such as carpet and textile design by manipulating naturally formed geometric shapes to create innovative patterns. Trevino’s line work is mesmerizingly precise, with bright, bold colors that capture and hold the viewer’s attention. Giant sized versions of Trevino’s napkin designs are brought to life in the Kiosks of Main Plaza where each line is tangible and real.

Trevino is also known for his oil on canvas “line” paintings that blur and merge color in almost perfect linear fashion. He is obsessed with precision and color, both abundantly present in his drawings and paintings.

Artist Statement
Louis Vega Treviño has evolved a style that is both instantly recognizable as uniquely his own and deeply connected to historical precedents in American painting – traditions that include the art of Gene Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Agnes martin among Americans. Treviño’s work shares, as does the referenced tradition, a deep engagement with geometry. But, as with Kelly, Stella and, particularly, Sean Scully, geometry for Treviño is a generator, a matrix for creativity – never an end in itself. His reference to technology with geometric form is an anchor in the endless possibilities of pictorial space, and represents a rationalizing impulse that seeks both order and expressive spontaneity within the embrace of those opposing motives.
The surfaces of Treviño’s paintings are often optically unstable in a manner that challenges the classic 2-dimensionality of easel painting. His surfaces vibrate into a 3rddimension in an optical “push-pull” that reminds us of the visual theories of Hans Hoffman. In these remarkable paintings, the eye wanders over an almost disorienting field of hues that are both sumptuous and audacious.
And in recent work, the illusion of a 3rddimension has forced its way into real spaceas a result Treviño’s placement of one or more canvases on top of a larger underlying work. This provocative new practice reveals Treviño’s temperament at its most daring, a high-wire performance in which he risks erasure of his own work to stake out new ground in American geometric and expressionist art. These remarkable works, which Treviño has named “Transforms”, not only transform the pictorial space of traditional easel painting, they extend the practice of technological large gesture juxtaposition of multiple canvases that was first investigated by Sean Scully in the 1990s. It is clear that Treviño sees new territory from the frontiers of geometric art discovered by adventurers such Scully, Stella, Martin and Bridget Kelly. It should be fascinating to follow his path.