In NUEVAS FUNDACIONES, artists Jel Martinez, Kiki Valdes, and Mariana Monteagudo each demonstrate degrees of creating physical embodiments of their own practices. Each communicates through their prime foundations of painting, sculpture, surface layering and color. Beyond various art making differences, there is an underlying aesthetic value each artist possesses that unifies their work in the white box.
Jel Martinez examines the buff, where different methods in which graffiti and tags are covered over imbue his paintings with everyday visual realities from the street. Working on wood panels in his studio he instinctively replicates what happens over the history of a public wall. The result is a figureless expressionism that communicates through a multilayered use of texture, color, and shape that both obscures and highlights his use of surfaces.
Kiki Valdes uses cartoon imagery as both a visual lure and guide, taking the viewer deeper into abstraction and communicating through overlapping colors and a transformative array of forms that reconcile recognizable popular imagery with post contemporary painting.
Mariana Monteagudo’s dolls evoke images of childhood innocence and horror films, while channeling her obsessive vision through an intelligent use of color and meticulous detail. The illusionist landscape created by her dolls is one in which color moves us from one doll to another. In doing so, the viewer absorbs abstracted images of dolls, with colorful familiar bodies, topped by expressive and invitingly disturbing heads.
Photos by Heike and Robert Dempster besides photo 1 and photo 14, which were provided by Mariana Monteagudo
An Interview with Karen Starosta Gilinski
Love of Technology at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
Heike Dempster 
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