Slides

press release

For immediate release:

Robert Kananaj Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of recent sculptures and paintings by Oscar Figueroa. From the beginnings of Oscar’s collaboration with RKG four years ago, his work has continuously gravitated towards something we may call “hyperrealistic-conceptual". Attentiveness to experience informs the work, appearing as an abrupt element but contained by his distilled approach. 

Oscar converses with found materials, versed in language chosen in the blink of a thought or feeling, to words or ideas and concepts. Poetry within both artist and material, mundane and socially apparent, invites experience as an observant viewer.

 

Slides

Artist's statement:

 

This body of work sketches around the idea of movement and what its potential could look like. Symbols of continuous movement are fragmented, or paused, suspended, frozen, cut off, isolated, and blinded. Fragmenting images of movement is a peculiar idea to me; it almost seems surreal to understand something moving and not moving at the same time, and in a way this series seems to visualize philosophical ideas about how movement could be understood. 

The idea of movement presented as the slide is an especially interesting motif for me. The entire ‘journey’ of movement is literally presented at the line that constructs the slide itself—from the top of the slide that continues to the bottom, the decline presents the immediate direction where an object would travel. To me, this is a hauntingly beautiful image—forever able to predict the direction of movement, and ever-present as a gesture, a static ‘ghost-movement’.

In this series, I am also interested in the idea of disallowing such a potential for movement, as presented in the use of rope to restrict access. But again, hauntingly, the potential for movement sits ever capable behind the rope. Transforming the slide, also, into carpet material, extends this idea of restriction; something friction-less becomes pasted onto the ground like a heavy, static, and unyielding object. 

Lastly, an ongoing motif in my practice is the use of lined paper as a base for presenting my ideas. The use of this type of paper—universal for objective notation—carries my intention of presenting these ideas as objective and conceptual ones.  

 

Cutting off movement, cutting off motion, cutting off swirls and slides, swirls and slides go to an unexpected ending. Going and then stopping. Half-finished, half-started, motion forced, start and stop, start and stop. 

Oscar Figueroa

December 2017

 

Oscar Figueroa (b. 1990, Hamilton, Ontario) currently lives and works in Toronto. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2013 with a BFA in Drawing & Painting, and a minor in English studies. He has exhibited solo and group shows in Toronto and Miami. Slides is Oscar Figueroa’s third solo exhibition with RKG

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