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Iván Carmona: Sublime
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
PDX Contemporary Art is pleased to present Sublime, Iván Carmona’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery.
Based on nostalgia for his homeland of Puerto Rico, each of Iván Carmona’s sculptures draws from specific landmarks and key aspects of the Puerto Rican landscape. Abstractions of flora, fauna, water, earth, architecture and specific cultural references come together to recreate the landscape. Teeming with life, these haptic objects, with their saturated colors and evocative forms, transport the viewer to his life and time spent there.
As a youth, Carmona, with the help of his brothers, assisted his father in building the house that he grew up in. This experience of mixing, pouring and scraping concrete is one that still resonates with the artist as one of the first tactile experiences he can remember. It’s what initially brought him to work with clay and continues resonate with him over 30 years later. In the work, he adds texture that is reminiscent of the scraping visible in the concrete, and adds small ‘blemishes’ that are evocative of the material properties of concrete and earth.
Representing personal, physical and emotional experiences, each work recalls a particular moment in his life, and the color that he associates with it.