For NADA New York 2024, Booth 3.12, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents four artists, Melissa Huddleston, Luis Emilio Romero, Griselda Rosas, and Sherin Guirguis, whose abstract paintings are in dialogue with global historical and generational craft practices, amongst alternative trajectories of modernisms.
The paintings of Los Angeles artist Melissa Huddleston (b. 1982, Elm Springs, AR) are steeped in historic print and papermaking processes and suffused with her ruminations on primordial origins and the sublime happenstance of life. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is not applied, but transferred, through marbling water baths to achieve layered organic shapes, swooshes, and swirls of opalescent color floating with mysterious levity.
Luis Emilio Romero (b.1996, Barcena, Guatemala) is a New York based abstract painter who uses form and patterning as an active force of energy linked to weaving, with emphasis on generationally passed traditions of weaving in Guatemala. With color and mark making, the paintings speak powerfully to the notion of meditation, while the history of indigenous Guatemalan weaving techniques adds a complex spiritualism and peaceful involvement to his process.
Los Angeles artist Sherin Guirguis (b.1974, Luxor, Egypt) cross-pollinates architecture, text, and oral histories creating paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations that reactivate lost narratives. The work challenges the history of decoration and ornamentation and its relationship with social structures, cultural identity, and Women’s agency. The connection between the materials, processes and formal aspects are crucial to the stories’ retelling and embedded into each work, culminating in a visual code through which viewers access through the experience of abstraction.
Griselda Rosas (b 1977, Tijuana, Mexico) is an artist and art educator working between Tijuana and San Diego. She explores themes of cultural hybridity as they relate to identities through her works that consists of textile art, collage, painting, drawing, and curating. Amalgamating early known drawings of Mexico’s indigenous people, and a critical exploration of motherhood, as symbolized through several works with a gestural pencil or crayon marks made by her young son; Rosas creates by applying stories, objects, and textiles obtained from the US/Mexico border region.
The artists embrace values from historic and generationally trained and handmade processes while using abstraction to extend aesthetic languages and interpretations of expanded modernisms. Their incorporation and reverence for handmade techniques evoke an appreciation of timeless rituals and practices that are imbued and indexed through the artists’ rigorous handiwork, grounding us in human experience.
