ARTnewsALBERT CONTRERAS: FourBYFive, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
by Richard Speer
Theo van Doesburg on acid—is there any more succinct way to describe Albert Contreras’ latest batch of tripped-out DeStijlean abstractions? The 71-year-old painter is known equally for his twinkly, bracingly colored grids and his unusual life story. Back in the late 1960s, Contreras was a minimalist whose paintings grew so reductive, they all but disappeared, frustrating him aesthetically and leading, more personally, into clinical depression. He stopped painting for 25 years, driving a garbage truck and operating bulldozers in the interim. Finally, in 1997, with the aid of psychotherapy, he decided to pick up his paintbrush again, and to his surprise, jaw-dropping geometric etudes poured out of him, selling out shows and earning exuberant reviews in New York and his native Los Angeles.
In his latest outing, Contreras develops his virtuosic variations on the rectilinear theme, tilting his grids on the diagonal and refining his technique of sculpting acrylic squares and rectangles, which protrude as much as three-quarters of an inch from the base of the canvas plane. The shapes bevel at the top—a natural result of the paint contracting while drying—and appear in both symmetrical and asymmetrical compositions. There is an elegance to these checkerboard and quilt-like patterns that only occasionally becomes cloying (when the palette too egregiously juxtaposes pastels, primaries, and acid tones) and a contrasting complexity to the fractalizing, asymmetrical works, which convey the fevered improvisation of a mathematician gone mad.
Contreras’ special gift lies in his dialectic integration of hard-edged abstraction with luscious surface, of severe precision with a bubblegum pop that is pure L.A., right down to the sparkly effects he achieves with pearlescent and fluorescent paints, glitter, and interference pigments, which impart a metallic sheen and gee-whiz color shifts to his happy cubes. It’s as if an old-school neoplasticist spent a day at Claire’s in the mall, ogling metallic nail polishes and glittery lip glosses, then returned to the studio in epiphany. Sometimes it takes a septuagenarian’s long perspective to distill the gloriously untroubled superficiality of a teenybopper. With the structure of his grids framing—but never constricting—the chromatic razzle-dazzle of youth culture, Albert Contreras has leap-frogged his 25 dormant years and traveled, quite boldly, back into the future.
—Richard Speer
(Unedited plain-text version)