Mariangeles Soto Diaz: Utopian Tense of Green
A series of works that show an understanding of the depth of the color while challenging its boundaries. Opens March 19 at Ruth Bachofner Gallery.
A native of the oil-producing country of Venezuela, Soto-Díaz works through the modernist promise of abstraction, infusing it with a new set of meanings. The Utopian Tense of Green is a new series of paintings and drawings on linen, wood panels and Duralar in which Soto-Díaz explores the meaning of green from different angles: from Alexander von Humboldt's writings of his travels in the tropics to the island of Esmeralda (a mythic South American utopia), to the more evocative and poetic sense of the color. Each of the artist's series is based on one dominant color which the artist studies for years, producing a series of works that show an understanding of the depth of the color while challenging its boundaries. Based on preliminary sketches made on the computer, her process is enlivened by an organic sense of motion, broken symmetries and open fields. Soto-Díaz owes her love for color and hard-edge geometry to her graduate studies with West coast abstractionist Karl Benjamin as well as early exposure to Venezuelan colorists Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto. She has an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and an MA from Cal Arts.
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