Antonio Carreno
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Abstract art often offers the mind freedom, as mysterious forms encourage the viewer to embark on an imaginative journey. And Antonio Carreno’s 12 seductive paintings at G.R. N’Namdi do invite the spectator “to create his own interpretation,” as the artist himself has said. The soft-edged, earth-colored, often rectangular shapes of Aparici–n certainly don’t suggest particular objects or meanings, and there’s a wonderful lyricism to the way these “veils of color,” in Carreno’s words, flow together. At the same time these forms seem curiously imprisoned in space. The central rectangle that contains most of the others is surrounded by a dark border, and its edges are echoed by the painting’s many vertical and horizontal lines and stripes. Though we participate in the creation of this work, its two contradictory forms of consciousness–the mind imprisoned and the mind freed–modify our freedom.
Carreno, who lives in New Jersey, was born in the Dominican Republic in 1963, where he studied figure drawing and painting at the National School of Fine Arts. His early influences include Dominican artists Jaime Colson, Norberto Santana, and Marianela Jimenez; later the work of Paul Klee and Arshile Gorky became important to him. Critics have said that Carreno’s works are “intertwined with the concept of writing and transmitting ideas of secret…messages,” that they represent an “effort to bring the viewer in contact with nature,” and that they reflect “the legacy of surrealism.” He told me he prefers “the freedom and the movement that you find in organic shapes,” but he also says he doesn’t think of his works as just paintings anymore but as “sources of energy” that “talk to you beyond the concrete matter that you are encountering.”
