Loriel Beltrán: To Name the Light

“Sculpture is durational in a way that painting is not. Painting can be observed in a glance, whereas sculpture has to be explored in time and space. I try to bring this sculptural animation to my wallworks while keeping that “glance” effect of painting. Painting is like a container where everything compresses into this one thing, whereas sculpture expands into more ambiguity.”
— Loriel Beltrán

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present To Name the Light, the London debut of Miami-based, Venezuelan-born artist Loriel Beltrán. Featuring five new paintings, including the monumental work Total Collapse (Miami/Seoul), 2024, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s engagement with time—geological, biological, historical, linguistic— as a conceptual framework to explore the phenomenological effects of light, color, and materiality. This exhibition will be accompanied by the artist’s fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by curator Katherine Rochester. Beltrán has become known for his sculptural accumulations that poetically combine aspects of painting and sculpture. Employing custom-made molds and layers of paint, each work is produced through a meticulous process of pouring, embedding, compressing, drying, slicing, and finally assembling each vibrantly pigmented cross section into an abstract composition. Beltrán’s paintings materialize color in its full complexity in such a way that recalls the work of abstract painter and theorist Joseph Albers (1888-1976), whose exacting investigation of chromatic interaction expanded the possibilities for modern color theory. Albers asserted that “as basic rules of language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over.” Beltrán has developed his own chromatic language that also incorporates an element of chance in the interplay between material viscosity, gravity, and time. The resulting images are prismatic, as though color and light are emanating from every visual cut / break in the composition.Total Collapse (Miami/Seoul), 2024, the centerpiece of the exhibition, is the literal and metaphorical collapse and compression of the body of work the artist produced for his recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul.

Beltrán has incorporated residual elements and pieces of works from that show into the compressed layers, making the palette a register of prior paintings. Seemingly frozen in a transitional state of becoming and disintegrating, between representation and abstraction, the painting is composed of striated sections of typically discordant pigments––vibrant blues, reds, greens, and yellows are placed next to areas of deep maroons and browns, next to pastel pinks, purples, and blues––to surprising and sometimes technicolor effect. In a recent interview with the artist, curator Katherine Rochester states, “Beltrán’s work applies increasing pressure to the distinctions between categories that organize our anthropocentric view of the world. Nature and culture, science and philosophy, language and image, sculpture and painting are all subjected to a series of artistic operations that create new forms from a hybrid use of references and materials. ‘What remains on the other side of total collapse?’” For Beltrán, it seems that what remains is an endlessset of possibilities in the undefined space of perception. 

Image: (detail) Loriel Beltrán, Shattered Screen, 2018-2023, courtesy of Lehmann Maupin.