Hugo Bastidas, Fountains

The timely subject matter of Hugo Bastidas’ black and white paintings is driven by deep concerns for the human condition, globalization, and its effect on the health of our planet. In Autobiography as Critique (2014) Howard McCalebb wrote: “An important Latin American born artist showing an interest in 1980s Representational Painting is Hugo X. Bastidas. His paintings can be appreciated as a second generation of the rebirth of representational painting in the late 20th Century, in the United States. Unlike the paintings of Tansey, Bastidas’ quasi-conceptual monochrome artworks generally do not critique art theory–or challenge art world dogma. Bastidas joins the mission to rethink representation, and to look more closely at the content of representational modes of expression, to exploit the language of the embedded idea within the pictorial structure itself. His subjects vary from social and/or political concerns, to complex pictures that conflict visual perception against cerebral comprehension.”