Eduardo PORTILLO - Jeremy THOMAS - Light and Space in South-West

Press release

Eduardo Portillo and Jeremy Thomas are both inspired by nature, and landscape, light, and space in Texas, and New Mexico.

This past summer, Galerie Richard welcomed Eduardo Portillo to the gallery with his first solo show in New York titled Slanted + Over–Lit. Portillo’s paintings relate as much the literal edges than the surface of the pictorial plane, realizing his personal desire to deviate from the rectilinear into real space. From the beginning, he has been developing a specific aesthetics based on protrusions, “dents of resistance” which point out in unexpected parts of the canvas as if the material itself had the last word. His work is also about light, space, and color. His shape canvas brings a new visual aesthetics in the art history of painting. Their three-dimensional aspect and their abstract vocabulary are open to multiple interpretations which combine and enrich his works.

Eduardo E. Portillo was born in El Congo, El Salvador in 1986, and currently lives and works in Houston Texas. He obtained a B.F.A at the University of Houston, TX in 2011. He participated in solo and group exhibitions in art galleries in Houston, Dallas, Denver, and San Antonio and in museum exhibitions in the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Blouin Art Info, Art Ltd, West, 1 /1 Mag, Entropy Mag, The Know, and The Denver Post.

Presented are works selected from Jeremy Thomas’ exhibition titled Analog in the spring of 2018. The title emphasizes the materiality of the process opposed to digital processes. He explains, “to me, working with this material, it’s a back-and-forth between the artist says this, the material says that”. By injecting air into malleable steel that’s heated to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, he creates and develops a complete new vocabulary of spontaneous, organic, and sensual shapes.

“Steel”, Thomas says, “is quite malleable and actually a lot like clay” (though admittedly it only exhibits those characteristics at upwards of 2000 degrees Fahrenheit). After welding flat steel plates together and then subsequently heating them, Jeremy Thomas injects them with pressurized air, inflating, or “growing” them into their final shape. Finally, he paints them with metallic car paint. In the case of some of the smallest pieces, he used nail lacquer for the first time, which expanded his range of colors. The largest sculptures are inflated without the heating process by adding air pressure into cold forms progressively. He can also ingeniously reverse the process and deflate them using a special technique involving extreme cold. Occasionally, his sculptures can explode during the process; Thomas is a risk taker playing with the limits of the material’s resistance. Some of his new sculptures are part inflated and part deflated.

Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1973 the artist lives in Espanola in New Mexico. Jeremy Thomas will have a solo exhibition at Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM, in 2019. His works are in the Albright–Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, AZ, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM, the Kunstsammlung F. Hoffman-La Roche AG, Basel, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Malibu, CA, Fidelity Investments of Albuquerque, NM.