STATEMENT
I view the making of "art" as a journey, a learning experience in which the artist is continually striving to better understand his craft and the principles of picture making. For me, it is an on-going assimilation of the relevant art that came before, in order to move forward. It is a journey in discovering one’s own unique and personal vision of art, a vision used for the construction of the two-dimensional picture plain in which a select lexicon of colors, shapes and patterns dictates space
In developing the subject matter for each painting in the “Urban Abstract” series, my focus is to allow the artwork to become a simplification of the observed. Every distinct area or pocket of a city has its own uniqueness and it is this uniqueness that I strive to reinterpret into the abstract so that the essence of the area is not visually diluted. Each painting in this continuing series is to be a manifestation of this, a two dimensional robust and rigorous architecture of the contradicting terrains of a diverse city. The intent of each work is to incorporate such landscapes as that of Long Island City, a predominantly industrial area of Queens, an area that is often seen but overlooked. In contrast there is the backdrop of Manhattan's skyline, or the billboards, neon flashing signs and endless traffic of Times Square as juxtaposed against the more classical architecture of the financial district. The “Urban Abstract” paintings strive to bring a new and unique understanding and appreciation of the urban landscape and architecture to the viewer.
The series is divided into three parts. The 1st part incorporates actual bits of the real landscape into an abstract space, the 2nd uses a vocabulary of pure abstract forms to allude to the landscape while the 3rd part strongly suggests the existence of the real in the abstract space. Yet, all the “Urban Abstract” paintings remain structurally informed by an amalgam of compositional elements arrive at through the same reductive art making process.
The “Urban Abstract” paintings are intended to invite the viewer to reexperience the ordinary through these deliberate creations, to see the city in the abstract of a painting as a dialectic tension which is simultaneously both visually lucid, exacting and challenging in a quirky and playful manner.
October 11, 2019
Bonelli