Self-contained art: Variety of abstract pieces featured in UVAL exhibit

‘In the Abstract’

WHERE: Kika de la Garza Fine Arts Center, 921 E. 12th St., Mission

WHEN: Through May 31

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday

CONTACT: (956) 591-0282 or www.uppervalleyartleague.org

COST: Free and open to the public

“In the Abstract” is an exciting deviation from the representational fare that usually dominates the Upper Valley Art League space.

With submission guidelines restricting works to those based on the Abstract genre — art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colors, and textures — the show is surprisingly large with 33 artists showing 87 artworks.

“I was surprised about what people define as abstract art,” summarized Veronica Lucas, acting registrar. “It’s a senses-overload because there are so many different textures, so many different colors, so many different sizes. It’s just a lot and it all came together, which makes it a great show.”

Abstract art lets us become immersed in the beauty and energy of the visual elements without the use of a referenced object. The work is about itself, not a person, animal, or landscape that might distract from the imaginative use of the medium and its geometric/amorphous shapes.

For those who like their art to be illustrations of beloved subjects this may seem boring. It is not. Done well, it can grab you. Abstract art focuses the viewers’ attention within a designated picture plane or a spatial existence and can form an immediate bond with the viewer. The Abstract artist may evoke emotional states, but the perceived situation is generated in the mind of the viewer.

Maintaining the ethic of the genre, Sarah L. Thomas’ large “Unnamed” acrylic painting is a show-in-itself. With dynamic tensions between warm and cool colors she interjects diagonal chaos among wide linear shapes and smaller patterned shapes that have a sense of uncontrolled overgrowth. Can this be a battle for survival?

George Holland shows a bronze and several ceramic sculptures that embody peaceful aesthetics, but “Imagine,” an acrylic painting by Holland, offers a dynamic visual dichotomy. Fierce bursts of color and light tones are layered over freefalling geometric patterns on one side while tightly organized darker shapes appear on the other. It, too, emits a sense of happening.

Two Modernist pieces are markedly different. Marge Phegley’s linear shapes and neutralized colors suggest non-objectivism in her “Echoes of Structured Drift.” By contrast, Vicki Guerra’s fiber piece, “Dilemma,” composes black and white rectangular shapes against a neutralized yellow ground and keeps our eyes engaged through controlled repetition and variance.

There are works that are abstractions of a representational subject; in these, the abstract elements merge with and successfully dominate a once recognizable object. Jacinto Zambrano’s dramatic photographs leave his subjects as a blaze of color, while Robert Codina’s limited-focus photographs cling hazily to their scenic origins.

Then there are some pieces that seem to have walked into the show by mistake. A painting of a small realistic red cap is one, and its flat orange background can’t save it. A painting of two women is clearly an attempt at realism, not abstraction. There are also collages that include images of realistic figures; they are collages and like all other art forms, may or may not be abstract, but here, the realistic images are too much with us.

As usual, there is a lot going on in this exhibit and many considerations to mull over. Take a friend and spend time “In the Abstract.”

Nancy Moyer, Professor Emerita of Art, is an art critic for The Monitor. She may be reached at nmoyer@rgv.rr.com.

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