LOS ANGELES — When people discuss their understanding of the violence underlying the logic of contemporary American society and capitalism, they often point to an awakening moment, a period of time when they began to see — and could no longer ignore — how the system works.
Standing in front of artist Linda Arreola’s latest range of abstract works, I found myself tossing between two points of view. One is what I could see immediately: their formal beauty, with clean lines, bright colors and compositions that rely on his first explorations in abstraction. As she notes in his artist statementshe is drawn to the shapes of circles and squares to explore “the humble icons of a great spirit”.
But in the heat of 2020-2023, when so many of us were locked down, Arreola began to incorporate words and architectural elements into his art. It was this second vision of his work that surprised me. Drawing inspiration from Mesoamerican architectural forms, she continues her explorations of abstraction but inserts words and phrases that, in my mind at least, concisely describe the brutal logics around victory and ageism – U LOST I WON, LITTLE GRAY HAIRS, EYE ON PRIZE.
The artist’s most recent set of paintings, mostly acrylics on canvas, consist of Linda Arreola: Abstract Wanderings of LA’s Borderlands 2020–2023, playing this month at 50 Avenue Studios in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. In “Uvalde Children” (2022), for example, strong vertical lines and boxes with dot matrices resemble the entrance to a door or a temple. But when the word “CHILDREN” appears on either side of the canvas, the composition begins to look like the entrance to a school – the very one that police delayed entry as shooting occurred.
In “U Lost/I Won” (2021), the four architectural windows contain Xs and O’s, like the kisses and hugs one might send to a defeated opponent. And “Dump” (2022) reads like a vertical flag, with grey, red, yellow and black channels to, well, a dump. As part of a program on the borders, it made me think of the problem of illegal city dumps, which has increased during the pandemic. “Instead of the hopeful aspiration or spiritual contemplation of earlier works, these paintings are tuned to an anxious awareness of numbers, units, and quantities,” curator Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia writes in the exhibition catalog. “Rather than meditating, swirling or gathering, they triangulate, multiply and accumulate.”
As I walked around the gallery admiring the art, I once again noted the back and forth between appreciating their formal composition and absorbing the little messages sprinkled throughout. I imagined Arreola wandering in his mind during lockdown, just like me, looking outside and wondering how such a brutal world could go on, and why it’s so hard not to see it. If we understand spirituality to include the bold exploration of the interaction of shadows with what is on the surface, this next stage of his work is just as spiritual in my mind, maybe more.
Linda Arreola: Abstract Wanderings of Los Angeles’ Frontier Lands 2020-2023 continues at Avenue 50 Studios (131 North Avenue 50, Highland Park, Los Angeles) through July 29. The exhibition was curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia.
