Jesus De La Rosa • Works on Paper
David Freeman • Paintings
Scott Nicol • Sculpture

Opening Reception
Friday, 02 April, 6:00 p.m.
On View: April 2 - May 2, 2010

GALERIA 409
409 E 13th St.
Brownsville, TX 78520
Phone:956-455-3599
Email:Galeria409@yahoo.com

Galleria 409 hosts trio of artists
The Brownsville Herald
By TRAVIS WHITEHEAD
April 11, 2010 10:34 PM

The twisted branches are held up by ropes, one end crowned by a mass of beeswax that wings out like a kite. This piece is part of an exhibit by Scott Nicol called, "Transpiration," made of three different sets of branches with areas covered by beeswax on display at Galeria 409 until April 23. The other two exhibits include paintings and graphite works by Jesus De La Rosa and artwork by David Freeman.

Many of Freeman’s paintings depict brightly-colored bubbles with concentric circles of different colors inside. Other paintings show a scattering of colorful dots and smears.

"Actually, those have a lot to do with the idea of process," said Freeman, who teaches at South Texas College. "Life is a process and I’m just kind of reflecting, mirroring the whole idea of life as a process, and you can see through layers, the stacking of information. It’s a little bit of design by accident."

A ladder made of bamboo by Freeman stretches across a wall covered by his paintings; Freeman has attached ghastly thorns to the rungs. The ladder, he says, is symbolic of the challenges faced by people coming to the United States.

The pieces titled "Transpiration" are about exploring the life of the wood, says Nicol, who teaches art at South Texas College.

"Generally when we look at trees they seem very static," he said. "You know that they are alive on some level but the growth, the movement is so slow that you’re not very conscious of it. And so I was trying to really capture the sense of movement within that in a sense of growth and exaggerate it a little bit by selecting certain pieces, making them more animate in terms of more animal like, more like they’re swimming or moving through space in a way that we associate with life."

The one on the bottom floor is made of three long tendrils of mesquite, while the beeswax covers a frame of mulberry. Mark Clark, owner of Galeria 409, said the hooks on the ends look like weapons, or fish hooks used by Indians of what is now the Northwestern United States.

The whole structure, he said, is a little menacing."They have some psychological overtones, like wings of bats," he said. This piece turned out differently than he had planned. "I got that piece and I thought it was going to be a big vertical standing kind of tripod thing, and then as I kind of worked with it I realized that that wasn’t the way it needed to be," Nicol said.

Upstairs, visitors will find two more of Nicol’s works, plus charcoal creations by Jesus De La Rosa. "He takes a graphite soaked rag and throws it on the paper and there’s almost instantaneous shades of light and dark stretching across the canvas," said Clark with admiration. "They are almost organic. You can make out faces and animal forms, internal organs. Some look like they have been X-rayed."

De La Rosa, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, said he made the charcoal drawings as a way of making fast quick drawings that would also have very complex visual qualities. "It’s supposed to overwhelm the viewer," he said. "And the idea is that you have all these drawings that are made by the same process and each one is unique. And when you see them as a group that uniqueness ties them all together and at the same time it’s what’s making them all ordinary. So I’m relating it back to people."