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Adrian Jesus Falcon’s Marriage of the
Indigenous and the Modern
Adrian Jesus Falcon, an architect, painter,
and sculptor who lives and works in a border
town in Texas, has found a unique medium
that he has recently made an integral part
of his aesthetic. In his first New York
exhibition at Montserrat Gallery, 584
Broadway, Falcon showed four large paintings
on “petate,” large mats hand-woven from palm
leaves by an indigenous tribe in Mexico.
Petate are traditionally utilized for a
variety of purposes in Mexico- including as
surfaces for drying coffee beans, for floor
coverings, as bed mats- and are said to date
back to the Mayans and the Aztecs.
Employing oil paints, acrylics, wood-filler,
glue, and charcoal, Falcon creates
brilliantly colored compositions that are
all abstract; except for one picture called
“Haven,” in which a large hook-nosed face
looms in profile like an oversized puppet in
a Punch and Judy Show. This picture is
called “Haven,” a title that suggests that
the figure may be seeking shelter by getting
lost among the surrounding abstract forms.
Yet it ends up standing out as distinctly as
the sharply silhouetted figures in
Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for the Moulin
Rouge.
Stylistically, Falcon’s work seems most akin
to the Dutch painter Karel Appel; however
Falcon’s brilliant color areas, filled
almost to the bursting point with rhythm and
movement, declare their originality as
surely as the woven textures in the petites
that he paints on declare their indigenous
origins. His palette, dominated by hot
reds, brilliant blues, and ochers, also
recalls the fiery qualities of Orozco,
Rivera, and the Mexican muralists. Yet he
employs such hues with an even more brutal
force.
Falcon fills large areas of his textured
surfaces with color, then works over them
with vigorously slashed lines that appear to
allude to both human and animal anatomy
without quite spelling anything out. Even
in his most abstract composition there is
the spirit, if not the actual appearance, of
the figure in the energetic thrusting of his
brush and his sense of velocity that it
injects into the picture space. There are
also hints of landscape space in Falcon’s
abstract shapes, as though to suggest that
all things in nature must ultimately meld.
A painting called “Militant” lives up to its
name by virtue of its gestural violence. By
leaving an area of the woven petate bare of
pain in another work called “Idiom,” Falcon
seems to call attention to how a language -
or in this case a craft form - can epitomize
a particular people. And in a composition
called “Ambiguous,” the way in which lines
intersect suggests how any gesture can be
interpreted in a variety of different ways.
Indeed, it is his ability to invest his
paintings with a many meanings, even as they
impress us on a more immediate level with
their brash beauty and bold scale that makes
Adrian Jesus Falcon's first New York
exhibition an auspicious event.
-Peter Wiley-
May 2005
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