Outlines

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Luis Roldán’s artistic practice is nourished by art history, literature, the urban setting, and his experiences in his studio. These varied stimuli, mediated by his broad sense of space thanks to his studies in architecture, make his artistic practice a path that points to many directions, unpredictable and unclassifiable.

During the 1980s, his inquiry into abstraction through painting laid the groundwork for a later exploration of discarded materials and found objects, therefore broadening and complexifying what we know as abstract art. Roldan’s work reveals that abstraction is a fertile ground for experimentation, thought, and resistance, as well as an artistic language anchored to everyday life and context.

Perfiladuras [Outlines], is a project that brings together a diversity of works in a variety of media and formats created at different stages of the artist’s career, which, although seemingly dissimilar, are the result of profound processes of reflection on material culture, loss, and the past. They also invite us to speculate on Roldán’s thought process, while highlighting that abstraction today, according to Cecilia Fajardo Hill, “proposes itself as an oblique way of discussing and participating in the reality in which we are embedded, often in an attempt to resist the alienating pervasive politics of representation of the real and propose alternative visualities.”¹

 

Paula Bossa