Sightlines

Martin Blaszko, Marcelo Bonevardi, Feliza Bursztyn, Sergio de Camargo, Agustín Fernández, Gego, Edgar Negret, Alejandro Otero, César Paternosto, Carmelo Arden Quin, Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar, Omar Rayo, Francisco Salazar, Fanny Sanin, Jesús Rafael Soto, Victor Vasarely

Leon Tovar is pleased to present Sightlines. Featuring a range of artists spanning several countries—from Venezuela to Argentina, Colombia, and Hungary— this exhibition is a careful consideration of the use of line and shape to cultivate readings of space that are beguiling, ambiguous, and ultimately enchanting. From one piece to another, viewers will be able to explore the richness of line as it flows between works, changing its guise.The work on view is comprised of crisp edges: the straight, hairline ridges that appear along the borders of Fanny Sanín’s evenly painted chromatic units—the results of carefully placed masking tape—reverberate with the sharply cut aluminum sheets of her compatriot Edgar Negret, which unfurl into space like the black and white ribbons of Omar Rayo’s two-dimensional paintings. The thin red, yellow, and blue streaks of Marcelo Bonevardi’s Buntlines (1972) more explicitly define structure and organize space, their angularity and neatness of application betraying the craft and skill of the former student of architecture, while Francisco Salazar disrupts the uniformity of his horizontal ridges with cut outs and collage.

Highlights include Jesús Rafael Soto’s Escritura Mediana (1982), which showcases two very different conceptions of line in the production of an electrifying visual experience. In front of a background covered in alternating black and white lines—a hallmark of the artist’s practice since the late 1950s and early 1960s—Soto suspends individual rods from nylon string, each rod bent to curve and arc in a dynamic rhythm before the staid and neutral background. A characteristic example of the artist’s famous “Escritura” series, Soto combines the expressive possibilities of line produced by the artist’s gesture—or his “writing”—with the impersonal procession of the black and white linear pattern. As the rods move before the striated background, or as the viewer changes their angle of vision, this conceptual tension manifests in the perception of flickers as viewers try to maintain a distinction between foreground and background.A second highlight is an important early example of Edgar Negret’s seminal “Magic Machines” series, created during a period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the artist called New York City home.With its flat application of color, and clarity of its faceted shapes and angular lines, Aparato Mágico y equinoccio (1957) encapsulates the cool aesthetic that the artist was developing alongside his friends and peers Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman.