An Intimate Complicity

Exhibition:
October 18 – December 31, 2014

Opening Reception:
Saturday, October 18, 2014 from  7:00-9:00pm

Lisa Sette Gallery is proud to present a 20 year retrospective of the works of Luis González Palma commemorating the season opening of the gallery’s expansive new space, and its recently-announced exclusive North American representation of Luis González Palma.

I am deeply interested in how images are articulated in our minds, as what we call reality. My works are an interpretation of that reality, a reality full of stories, memories, crossed paths… They are remnants, left over from a fragmented world and dreamed into being. – Luis González Palma

A Guatamalan photographer who has been exhibiting internationally for nearly three decades, González Palma’s photo-collaged portraits superimpose Latin American and European spiritual and artistic traditions, and mine the complex relationship between the observer and observed in contemporary photography.

González Palma employs a range of exotic photographic techniques to achieve his works’ startling, aqueous effect: gelatin silver processing, gold leaf and resin inclusions, Kodalith prints, or, in recent works, inserting stark blades of acrylic paint that cleave the images’ otherwise serene aspects. González Palma is known for leaving true the whites of his models eyes, which glint eerily from a sea of dusky sepia.

Many of González Palma’s works are portraits of performers who are of Mayan descent, as is the artist himself. They peer out at the viewer with a frank, numinous, and strangely impassive mien, foregrounded against a constellation of symbol and metaphor—an Elizabethan ruff, for example, or a set of statuary wings. González Palma’s intention is to create a subconscious connection between model, artist and viewer, bringing each together in the fraught, sensuous moment of looking:

I think the photographer does not give dignity to the models, but dignity exists within them, and the photographer can become a link, allowing for a complex relationship between the model image (not the model) and the public. There’s a great collaboration, an intimate complicity, between photographer and model—it is necessary to generate an intensity that is not seen but rather “felt” in the image. – Luis González Palma

Möbius, González Palma’s latest body of work, juxtaposes the early 1900’s concretist/rationalist movement in Latin American art with the midcentury streak of intense nostalgia—also known as magical realism. To do so, González Palma intersects his romantic, sepia-toned portraits with striking geometrical arrangements in primary acrylics.

My aim with “Möbius” is to create works that allow for a new dialogue between my photographs, usually portraits loaded with emotion and subjective intensity, with abstract geometric painting elements referencing Latin American concretism… providing a rereading of the visual history of ideas from this side of the world, from its history and its contradictions. – Luis González Palma

Staged in Lisa Sette Gallery’s stunning new Al Beadle-designed desert-modernist space, a subterranean gem in midtown Phoenix, and echoing some of the gallery’s ongoing concerns with the timeless aesthetics of emotion, romance and danger as they are experienced in contemporary life, An Intimate Complicity promises to be a fitting fall-season inauguration of the gallery’s impressive new location, and an unflinching plunge into the dreams and history of the New World.