April 14 - May 10, 2023
From Barbara Davis Gallery:
“Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to present “Dream Dust”, a solo exhibition by Eduardo Portillo opening Friday April 14, 2023 from 6:30PM to 8:30PM.
How does reshaping the familiar ignite a pull to the unknown? Following this instinct, Eduardo Portillo explores a craving to understand the space around us in Dream Dust. There is awe and wonder behind what typically goes undiscovered, and what is taken for granted – the space in which we exist.
A love for physical landscape evolved to a curiosity of cultural landscape, especially as Portillo learned at a very early age that he would be moving from his home in El Salvador to the United States. Everything changes when you move – the space you’ve spent years exploring falls out from under your feet, and suddenly the world around you is a new planet, engulfing, enrapturing. From soft natural topography to sharp constructed skyscrapers, the question arises: what is the meaning behind this contrast and what can we do with it?
Portillo’s exploration of this consideration is manifested in intuitively shaped and colored canvases. In Dream Dust, his canvases grow from the wall, points stretching outward like roots under shallow earth. Using a soft natural palette, Portillo emulates the gentle nature of soil, sand, and skin. The shapes have sharp corners and strong edges, often slotted together like a nearly perfect puzzle. The way the canvases interact holds a certain tension; pushing and pulling against each other. These shapes are like a secret handshake between Portillo and the landscape he’s spent his life writing love letters to – hills, roads, forests, buildings, fields are all made as alien as possible.
The medium of Portillo’s work is as flexible as its interpretation. After dodging definitions and escaping cloches, his work finds home in something as simple and intuitive as drawing. With an emphasis on line and instinct, he draws with space. In a way, his shapes become humanoid, dictating their own personalities after Portillo breathes life into their structure, placement, and their direction. The three dimensionality of the work interacts with light in a very deliberate way. The shadows cast are living lines, shifting with the sun (basking like a literal landscape would). Landscapes thrive in their details, gentle secrets begging to be discovered after the initial impact of the composition as a whole.
The details in this work are fresh to the artist himself, as he dives into medium inclusions of mirrors and sand. These two symbols reflect one another and reflect the core of Portillo’s work – the natural elements and the man-made working together to create something entirely new. The glass of mirror is made from sand, a throughline that symbolically speaks to the way the earth can be manipulated. Light and time are both incredibly important to these aspects; the sand falls like a freeform hourglass, recording the time that the mirror captures visually. The way the lighting intentionally hits the works changes it completely, controlling what you can see reflected in the mirror and molding the shadow to new shapes and dimensions. Discovering more about the medium and himself as he constructs his installation, Portillo uncovers something electric in the most modest of materials.
Portillo’s work is an abstraction of form and of emotion, connecting with each individual viewer differently depending on their own relationship with and love for their environment. Beginning elemental and reaching far into outer space, Dream Dust encapsulates the spirit of the artist and the reverence he has for the world we all inhabit. Whether natural or built, the sentiment we have for our surroundings is inescapable, and the childlike wonder that catalyzes our desire to explore and stake a claim in those surroundings never fully leaves us. With Portillo’s work, it is crucial to get lost in the meditation of the space he creates, because once you’re lost, you’re able to find what unknowns you crave to know.”
Reception: April 14, 2023 | 6:30–8:30 pm
Performance: May 13, 2023 | 12–1 pm
4411 Montrose Boulevard
Houston, 77006 TX
(713) 520-9200
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