Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to announce Patrik Grijalvo and Tom Waldron: Compelling Structure. This is the artists’ first exhibition at the gallery which will open on October 2nd and run through November 13th.
While both artists work in different mediums, they share an affinity in the timeless exploration of the object as aesthetic form and the spatial relationships therein. Patrik Grijalvo is a Spanish photographer who travels the world capturing buildings designed by celebrated architects with his Hasselblad analogue camera. Back in his studio, Grijalvo prints his digitized photographs on Hahnemühle rag paper with pigmented inks and cuts the images, singling out and selecting certain architectural elements. Rather than depicting buildings as literal subjects, the images are recontextualized to become abstractions of shapes and forms, or into what Grijalvo terms as the “photo object.” Walls, windows, passageways, arcs and the like created by the starchitects are re-collaged into abridged abstracted compositions and arranged in varying degrees of depth, themselves becoming objects in different planes. The resulting works are adroit visual reinterpretations of architectonic characteristics of shape, mass, volume, depth, positive and negative spaces. Grijalvo earned his fine arts degree in Spain and has since participated in several artist in residency programs throughout Europe and Asia. While he has exhibited widely in Europe, this is his first gallery exhibition in the United States. His work is in several private and institutional collections including the Mango and Barset Collections in Barcelona; the Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam and the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece.
Tom Waldron’s brief background in architecture and urban planning is evident in his sensitivity to the way form, mass and volume can reshape the physical space. Made of steel, wood, hydro-stone or concrete, his sculptures are unadorned, reduced geometric objects. Compelling curvilinear suggestions of biomorphic shapes, ship boughs, plinths or modernist totems create a dynamic dialogue with the viewer and the spaces they inhabit. Even the larger, more volumetric works possess a gentle presence, their soft edges and minimal delineations are elegant and understated in their simplicity. Waldron’s stint with architecture was brief when he discovered welding and decided to fully dedicate himself to sculpture making. His primary materials are 1/4 or 3/16-inch steel plates which are rolled on a machine used to make water or fuel tanks. He cuts and welds the pieces together, sanding the seams with an angle grinder to achieve the desired finish. For Waldron, the arched lines and edges are the defining essence of his work. Any minute shift can alter a sculpture in its entirety, and he often sketches or creates cardboard maquettes to explore the way the three-dimensional designs behave in space. Waldron has works in the collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY; the Albuquerque Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others.
