Steven Miller | acfoundation

ANTONIO CARRENO / PAINTINGS:

Antonio Carreno ‘s paintings burst with abstract vitality. His gracious dramatic embrace of a style once considered radical and even offensive illustrates how well this kind of image making can continue.

Antonio is in the tradition of a cannon created by Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy, Hans Hoffman, Philip Guston, and such kindred Spanish painters as Juan Miro, Antoni Tapies, to name a few. In addition, Antonio’s overriding sense of color and content has a surrealist tone while also recalling the light-filled paintings of Matisse. With a rigorous academic background gained in his six-year program at the National School of Fine Arts, Santo Domingo in his native Dominican Republic and the Arts Student League, Antonio was attracted to abstraction for the freedom it offered him. In this mode , he found he could let his conscious thoughts engage formal artistic qualities of color, line, and structure while his subconscious often took an unpredictable course. It is always interesting to see where an artist produces his or her art.

The physical context of creativity can be informing. While paintings, prints, sculpture and photographs hold their own in various surroundings over time; their place of origin offers revealing insights. A look at Roman clouds tells us about Tintoretto’s skies, seeing Holland’s low terrain gives us an understanding of Rembrandt’s landscape etchings, standing on the rocky coast of Maine can bring us closer to Winslow Homer. At first, one might not think of Antonio’s paintings as being inspired by nature but the artist prefers to paint outdoors.

When weather prohibits this, his studio’s large windows offer an immediate proximity to the woods around his home. It is amusing to apply the Barbizon school’s once revolutionary practice of plein air painting to contemporary abstract painting. In Antonio’s case, it is a perfect fit. Antonio’s house is in a rural setting outside of Newton, NJ. Located in the northwestern part of the state, it belies stereotypes of a congested, industrial, paved-over metropolitan suburb. The artist states that many of the quick-drawn elements in his pictures come from nature. In these graphic notations we may see part of a tree, a leaf, clouds, etc. Such representational components appear to have abstracted and many are now part of Antonio’s personal calligraphy.

Antonio lays his canvases or board-backed paper on a flat surface that becomes a painting table. He thus has 360-degree access to the picture surface and can move around it as his painting grow. First, he applies a ground of polymer and sand. This provides a very shallow relief map upon which he proceeds to apply colors and drawing. If the polymer and sand are still wet , the application of paint is akin to fresco painting. Antonio is a traditionalist in many ways. Preferring to work fast, Antonio feels his best paintings are done quickly.

Fuss over a picture too much and it looses its vitality. However , determining the final touches of a work can take time and the artist often has a stack of paintings nearing completion. These he will return to as he lets the intuitive give way to the calculated. As with all artistic forms of expression , we look for analogies as we decipher Antonio’s paintings. For me, his work holds references to the color-field abstraction of the early 1970’s and abstract expressionism of the 1950s. He usually builds his color from the painting’s base and we see them lightening as they rise. Yellow is particularly consuming for the artist. This often-challenging hue is handled with dexterity .

Steven Miller

Director, Morris Museum. NJ