Overlapping Connections
Cecilia Villanueva Erik Hagen
January 8 - April 6, 2020
Located in an exclusive members’ club, please contact for more details:
Hannekehumphreyart@gmail.com
Cecilia Villanueva and Erik Hagen capture sensitive perspectives of the world and how humanity affects it. Paintings resembling aerial maps grapple with human movement and environmental impacts. The pure physicality of their work is also palpable. They share the love of exploring new processes with landscapes that become constructions, straddling painting and sculpture.
But in Overlapping Connections, they have stretched beyond these clear commonalities. The show includes diptyques they have actually created together, highlighting their inclusive and inquisitive natures. Here they have truly overlapped, sharing resources, relinquishing control, building upon each other’s input, and integrating new processes.
Cecilia Villanueva and Erik Hagen, Terra Incognita (diptyque)
Cecilia Villanueva and Erik Hagen, Land and Oceanic Reflections (diptyque)
The towering verticality of these pieces is arresting, making them appear as abstract slivers of our world as seen from an airplane. A feast of textures, complex lines, and delightfully delicate color invite the viewer to discover the undiscovered.
Terra Incognita is an exploration of the land, but also a discovery of working with another artist, in respect of the other’s mark. Land and Oceanic Reflections muses on how little is known of nature despite all the technology at hand.
Cecilia Villanueva’s paintings are informed by the blue prints she received from her father, an architect in Mexico City. Hers is an ongoing study of the interactions between people, buildings, and the landscape. The blue hue permeates pieces, imparting a calm, meditative quality. And the viewer is drawn in by the intricate tracing of lines and myriad of texture created with ink, oil stick, graphite, and collage.
The paintings also convey life across different cultures and places, in Mexico, the Chaco culture, and Texas. Grid-like forms suggest order, but also disorder and impossible architecture. She paints the galloping growth of Mexico City built on Tenochtitlan Island. Houston appears as a dandelion from the sky, beautiful and fragile.
Even her own daily routine in Houston is mapped. Both a personal diary of the unremarkable and historical record of one’s movement. The tracing covers a four-mile radius, illustrating how people hover in limited areas, which become home.
Erik Hagen has an engineer’s sensibility in referencing geological processes like sedimentation and erosion to evoke the earth’s history. He blurs time, exploring Deep Time before human existence and humanity’s role in the planet.
Paintings roll with hills, valleys, and rivers, resembling topographical maps. The Forgotten Landscape series portray the future when traces of humanity have been erased. A time when nature reigns and is resplendent with glacial lakes, created by embedding jewel-like resin in paintings. His process mirrors that of sedimentation, with slowly built up layers of hydrostone and paint glazes as well as random surprises from pourings.
Other pieces glow with light in ornate frames, giving them a precious feel. Yet they include artifacts found along Houston’s bayous or once valuable, but now discarded, possessions. Working as a collagist and combining the old with the new, he hints at the transitory nature of life, the futility of consumption.
© All rights reserved 2018. Hanneke Humphrey
For more information on the artists:
http://www.ceciliavillanueva.com
https://www.erikhagenstudio.com
Hannekehumphreyart@gmail.com