Hugo Sandoval's Page

My Role

Artist

My Discipline(s)

Visual Arts, Design

About Me And My Work

My name is Hugo Sandoval. I was born in Barranquilla, Colombia. I am a self -educated artist. I have been painting for the last twenty years, but very seriuosly the last six years. I graduated as a Professional Graphic Designer at The Center For Te Media Arts in New York.

Places I Would Like To Visit

France, Greece, Italy,Spain and Russia

Art Forms And Cultures I Would Like To Engage With

Sandoval in his formative years, he was ensnared by those experimental mandates in which decorative gestures prevailed. It was an incidental phase that, at any rate, encourage his birth as an artist, in the midst of the carnival festivities of his hometown, which made him take part with relish in the chromatic fantasies of its characters and opened the doors of aesthetic knowledge for him that would lead to an unending adventure.

His artistic evolution shows a particular kind of mimetic quality, akin to legacies from ancestral civilizations, as well as to trendy, increasingly explicit theories about the connectivity between man and the cosmic universe. It is as if the environments he constructs on each area of the canvas were presided by the buzz of cryptic information and riddles that playfully invite you to decode.

Homever, what he proposes are creatures animated by the lavish influence of color over figures or surfaces that become exciting with the reading of hues and symbols. From far, the choice of colors would seem to confirm his Caribbean roots, mainly because of the warm hues; homever, in the visual breakdown, the glowing faces of ornaments, moons and suns, or the whimsical composition of natural lansdcapes and planetary silhouettes, highlighted by simple arabesques in relief or by textures that break up the iconographic framework anywhere in he space, are, somehow, the meandering adaptation of messages lost in the legends of ancient sages, in the secrets of gods that guided the mysteries of pre-Columbian civilizations, and in the mythologies transported by the chains of slavery bound for new worlds.

Here, the conceptual inspiration plays, albeit unintentionally, at the empowerment of a theoretical justification, so coveted by the critical establishment as the principles of aesthetic evaluation. Nevertheless, the artist's intention couldn't be further from these concerns, because he is actually fascinated by the abstract impulse originating from the observations that he is interested in investigating: The language of the ancestors with their natural forces of color and, more often than not, with abstract shapes, shaded by symbolic simplicities ready to express themselves unambiguously.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to ask ourselves whether this original process, by way of which the painter deep-sea dives in the waters of his philosophical reflections, could be considered a creative act from reality with an abstract impetus - another critical meditation in the records of classic and contemporary painting - or whether it corresponds to an ascending evolutionary phase, in which the scope of the proposal is not yet approaching the sophisticated spectrum of the theoretical justification of the work.

Whether abstract-figurative, or abstract, plain and simple, his major contribution consists in bestowing emotional attributes to the elements invoked by him in his creative action, carried by each hue and color. Even though he deliberately rejoices in using some academic resources from movements like Cubism, or Primitivism, the suggestion doesn't aspire to get further than the ascertainment of his knowledge, as well as the need to show his experience, because his work, taken as a whole, point to the definition of a process, artistically variegated that offers mixtures of colors and shapes, some of them lacking in any obvious harmony.

When taken as a whole, his output can be diveded into three distinct series of works within the school of Abstract Figurativism; Music, Indigenist, and the Universe. In each of these series, acrylic stands out as the primary material and, from time to time, oil-acrylic mixed media to a lesser degree. The use of relief is a common reference associated with colors, especially in triangular compositions, as well as the tiny whorls that play the role of objects as testimonial.

My Artistic Affiliations

ICAL Latin-American Art Cultural Institute

My Web link

http://www.ArtWanted.com/Sandoval