Gonzalo Maciel: The horizon of light

                            "The perception of color is not only subjective, but also, attach to experience".

                                                                                                      J.W.Goethe

In the Zielinsky Gallery in Barcelona, ​​the young Argentinean artist Gonzalo Maciel (Buenos Aires, 1990) presents his recent works. Zielinsky Gallery opened its doors in 2015, representing emerging artists and consecrated mainly within the Latin American scope. It also has another gallery in Brazil and in 2018 it inaugurated a new space in El Maresme, near Barcelona, ​​called Zielinsky FAB, as a place that fuses art, design and artists' residence.

It is the first time that the Barcelona public can see his work live, although in Madrid it has shown, specifically in 2014 on the occasion of the art fair JustMad, through the gallery Panal 361. Anyway, his first exhibition was very young, in 2007, at the Buenos Aires gallery Prima, where a series of paintings on figurative paper was exhibited. He has also exhibited at the Recoletos Cultural Center in Buenos Aires and has participated in the biennales of Bahía Blanca de Arte Joven in 2017, both held in his country.

Now Maciel presents a series of works under the title Proyecto horizonte, with Argentinean curator Laeticia Mello, who currently resides in Barcelona. In this project only the light is glimpsed, since it is about showing light beams that come together in chromatic designs, which in turn originates the appearance of the horizons. In fact, all the colors of the horizon itself are fused in the same work, since the colors that exist in the sky are the primary ones: blue, red, yellow. The secondary colors appear with the mixture of two primaries, obtaining orange, green and violet.

According to Laeticia Mello, the artist's works produce "chromatic glazes constructed through physics, where the color palette used in photographs is produced by adding light with light. For this to happen, it is necessary to link three concepts: time, space and color ".

In some way, Maciel's works evoke the minimalism of the conceptual artist Dan Flavin, considered to be the "sculptor of fluorescent light", in which colored tubes produce different optical effects, although unlike the Argentine creator, Flavin paints the light, that is, the tubes are treated chromatically, and instead in the work of Maciel, it is the treatment of the light itself that produces these color effects.

In total ten pieces created mostly last year are exhibited, although there are also some from 2017 and 2019. All of them are made through a sequence of lights in loop, backlight, LEDs, RGB, acrylic and wood, or, in printing of pigmented inks on Hahnemühle paper. In them it is appreciated how the artist alternates different chromatic possibilities to form the horizons through the appearance of different gradations that go from violet to blue, passing through yellow. It is not about visualizing a horizon, but several horizons. It is as if in a landscape, in this case a marina, appears in the foreground the sand, then the sea, the horizon line and the sky, although the separation of these elements is defined by the painter himself. Somehow, this distribution of color in space recalls the compositions of Mark Rothko, with its huge rectangular color fields where a kind of horizons emerge, which are the limits where the change of color occurs.