Victor Estrada

In conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, Richard Telles presents a solo exhibition by Victor Estrada, his first with the gallery. In a suite of new oils on canvas and a recent cast resin sculpture, he mines the historic traditions of figuration, animation, and landscape to form surrealist hybrids. Within these traditions, he pulls aspects of the sublime into comic relief. The boundaries of figure / landscape traditions blur between the cultural and personal, subjective and objective, mind and body, spiritual and corporeal. Estrada’s earnest need for fluidity pervades his thinking and working methods. His thick painterly slurries of browns, pinks, and baby blues become polymorphic organisms. They retain aspects of Grotesque Realism, posited by Mikhail Bakhtin, in which the subjective body melds with the collective—and a slippage initiated by the carnivalesque and Magic Realism of Latin America, concerning issues of borders, mixing, and changing.

Setting forth on his painterly journey, Estrada has no distinct strategies other than being rooted in sensations from his body and past experiences. His interest in art and cultural history allows for their reference alongside sensual abstract passages that become corporeal things, which in surrealist fashion, avoid conventional logic. Estrada seeks the transcendence of symbolic and cultural constraints, keeping their meanings unfixed in favor of a deepening idiosyncratic vision. For instance, he knows the color of his wife’s skin spurs his copious use of brown more than its connotations of trees or the gastro-intestinal tract, yet all these signs are internalized together in a space without hierarchy.

In Estrada’s four by five-foot painting "I was Walking and She Threw Me a Look aka Froggie Went a Courtin’", two brown forms float in space from which tan, coiled ‘antennae’ emerge, echoed by a foot-like appendage planted on an aqua-green ground. Elements of the landscape tradition are further anchored by a recession of space populated by abstract passages behind, only to be solidified by a hybrid cat-raccoon creature nestled next to a terra-cotta vessel. These cohabitations serve to undergird Estrada’s deeply held conviction that viewing and making work in concert for a state of non-differentiation, a space where fantasy and reality comingle and determine each other into newfound brews.

Victor Estrada has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at Washington Square Windows at New York University, New York in 2013. Other past solo exhibitions have been held at Shoshana Wayne, Los Angeles in 2003, 1998, and 1993; Friedrich Petzel, New York in 1996; and at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica in 1995. Venues holding group exhibitions featuring Estrada include the Vincent Price Art Museum in 2011; El Museo del Barrio and Americans Society, New York in 2010; Museo de Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico in 2009; LACMA, Los Angeles in 2008 and 2000; MoCA, Los Angeles in 1996; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 1995. Estrada was also featured in curator Paul Schimmel’s landmark Helter Skelter exhibition at MoCA, Los Angeles, in 1993. Estrada lives and works in Los Angeles.