That season brought color. Color spoke first, and she saw that it was good…

I was on one of my usual constitutional walks in a certain tree-ripened South Florida neighborhood when I received a hurried call from Hollye Davidson about the birth of this new series.  Of course, as we spoke, neither of us was aware that we were dealing with a birth, or a series, or even a change of headwinds of any kind.  The artist had simply been ruminating on yellows and had spent quite some time preparing a full canvas of the color in that state of communion that so characterizes painters, and so I thought to myself, “it’s sunny out with an 80 percent chance of Rothko so this chat isn’t a scorcher”.  The next thing I knew a week had passed, and our facetime call drew an unexpected interference. 

A human face had emerged on the canvas, and its impact was downright phantasmagorical.  For the rest of that month, Davidson found herself in a struggle with her practice, an encounter that became a series of spiraling inquiries, invitations, and more self-cross examinations than a jury of one could truly follow.  The resulting Portrait of Barbara emerged, a painterly and formal self-sentencing that loomed over the artist’s emerging color-first instincts.

For an artist so centered around her subjects, often human, mostly figurative, this notion of color as the primary protagonist began to persist in Davidson’s process.  This time around, she turned to face it, to give instinct its due place.  The result is this new series where human faces emerge from the color, the subtext, the undertone, and not the other way around.  With Waterlily, the painter was drawn to experience a very particular blue-green from Monet’s palette, and the countenance appears, floating upon the color with a spontaneity that evokes childlike integrity for the viewer. 

Other works, such as Close Reach, emerge as tactical expressions, offering a contemplation of color’s effect on the inner aspects of the subject. The delicate Fifth Season allows the subject’s soft expression to flow with a rare casualness that stands in quiet contrast to the comedian-on-wall driven, self-regurgitating art world extravaganzas that have been duct taped to our collective consciousness. 

This season’s works by Davidson and the exhibition  Let’s Face It: Embodying Color asks to be experienced in person, it calls us to gather around its colors, to be lighthearted for a moment, it insists on the value of the human experience as a central focus and a subject to be celebrated.  So join me on this walk, this synch we are encountering, in vivo, as we meet and greet the 2024 collection of faces by South Florida’s own Hollye Davidson during Miami Art Week.

Gined López Ganem

Miami, Florida, December 2024

On view December 5th-12th during Miami Art Week 2024

“The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness” – John Muir

In this exhibition, we are juxtaposing the works of two artists, Juliana Bukowitz and Roberto Montes de Oca, who reach toward universality through completely disparate lenses, one earthbound and the other cosmic, and who lead us to reflect within and without.

And we are not asking for a passive viewing or a cursory nod.  Rather, we are asking the viewer to move through the earthy, elemental reminders and invocations of our planetary home in the work of Bukowitz and from these activations of memory and birthright, to project the mind’s eye toward the celestial perspective brought by Montes de Oca. 

Bukowitz, mixed media on canvas, 2024

This movement seeks to evoke a spectral interference in the viewer, as if infra-red operators signaled the viewer through to visible light arrays and culminated in gamma infused frameworks each prompting a new confrontation, asking for a new solution. And this confrontation is not AND/OR but seeks to find new operators within us, within that “star-stuff” contained within us that Carl Sagan so famously alluded to, and that was so inspirational to Montes de Oca in this series. 

Montes de Oca, acrylic on canvas, 2023

So this Miami Art Week, let’s claim a space a to have a space.  In such fragmented times, let’s turn the tatters of our attention toward these marks, each in turn a guide, the reassuring yet beguiling strata of Bukowitz’s compositions like the heavy tow of our own ionic boundaries, our vibratory framework on the verge of being hacked. And from this vulnerable, venerable bio-space, let’s borrow Montes de Oca’s imaginary Webb telescope to project into time, to reflect as our ancestors reflected.  Or maybe even to reflect with our ancestors, somewhere in the antiquity of now.

Gined López Ganem

GG Art Space and AnEyeDiary would like to thank the Historic Dorn Building for hosting this exhibition.