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.
Waterlily, 2024
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.
Fifth Season, 2024
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.
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.
Most sensible folks would probably delay the prospect of a stroll through the sticky summer swelter of downtown Coral Gables until at least 4pm, but Alberto and I admit to a kamikaze streak, and so we showed up to artist Hollye Davidson’s new studio in the heart of the city beautiful daringly close to the stroke of midday in early June.
Hollye Davidson and husband Gary in the studio
The walls are an afterthought in this new space, and the expansive windows of the main studio endow it with a dramatic natural illumination that at once grounds and exhilarates the visitor. And this prepotency of light is as much a relief as the soothing presence of the artist herself. Her canvasses are presented on large easels across the main room as secondary actors, inviting the visitor to saunter and admire. In a contemporary art world obsessed with conceptual translation, with the need for continual intercessions, indulgences, rituals, and liturgies from experts that convey the intentions of artists to their audiences, Davidson appeals as directly to her viewer as the light will allow. In my mind, her work forms part of a necessary renewal and Reformation, the voice of an American artist unabashedly shaped by the traditions of Impressionism, Expressionism, and figuration who can “awaken” her viewer in a vernacular manner, in the vulgate language of intelligible forms.
Art collector Gined Lopez Ganem with “Inertia” and “Inquisitive Master”
Hollye Davidson is a Miami-based artist whose work has been featured in galleries and public works throughout the city and internationally. In portraiture, still life, and renderings of nature, the artist brings a steadfast concern with sublimating the emergence of form, with form as direct contact, with contact as distilled simplicity, with simplicity as nimble provocateur.
In a welcome departure from what art historian Fernando Castro Florez has called our era of “post-truth”, these distinctly feminine forms of insinuation and intimation, this minimalism of line and form, bring us to an easy sense of gratitude, to a harbor of resolute hope, to an unexpected glimmer of grace. Is there room for such optimism in the world of AI doomsayers and warlord eco-saboteurs? Can we trust our instincts with such a direct aesthetic appeal or will we hold fast to the crutches of art world babel fish? Let us know in the comments below. You can experience more work by the artist here.
Painter Hollye Davidson and guitarist Alberto Puerto
Beauty adopts the most varied and whimsical ways of presenting itself, sometimes ornamenting reality and drawing from it those virtues that give sustenance to the soul.
The artist Hollye Davidson, through her works, brings us close to a world at once animal and human, entangling it in a beauty that on occasion breathes in silence and at other times tends to launch shouts that besiege or cry out for help. The pieces selected for the exhibition Line and Essence arm themselves with these two presences, the images of horses living different moments of their lives and the female presence, so brief and fleeting that we feel that in a few moments, it will disappear.
Galliope, oil on canvas, 48″ x 96″
Two formal factors distinguish her work: the way in which she sometimes conjugates line with color, making them mutually dependent, without our ability to discern in which moments one predominates, and a second factor related to the aesthetic qualities of elegance and delicacy, qualities that gradually form different circumstances, fleeting moments that breathe and tend toward lightness.
Hollye achieves this intimate atmosphere, filled with brief moments, through the rhythm and movement that she imprints on each figure, especially in what meaning can be gleaned from a point of arrival, which becomes an antechamber to other forms of life.
The horse, a favorite character, is usually shown looking at the viewer in an insistent manner, from an expression that judges, questions, doubts and threatens, warning us of the setbacks that subsistence can bring us. Her greatest representation is found in the piece Galliope, where an enormous blue mare, “riderless” as the critic and curator Gined López would say, gallops forward, showing off her beauty, fearing nothing. Among all the works, she is distinguished not only by the monumentality that makes her powerful, but also, by that beauty of blue situated above any human valuation. Her arrogance distinguishes her with her gallop looking ahead; she is different from the rest of her peers who observe the spectator waiting for their judgments.
Among the images of horses positioned at different moments, either detained or waiting to stalk, ready to gallop or reared up, aggressive and annoyed, there is one galloping with his head inclined to one side and one who, full of colors, is looking calmly ahead. A special circumstance is contained in the work Fleurs de Pamela, in which we see a woman seated astride a couch, and at one end, the figure of a horse observes her, tilting its head, alone in his thoughts, serving as a protective guard. The woman remains calm, nothing disturbs her. Apparently, this imagined companion must be well known to her.
Fleurs de Pamela, mixed media on canvas, 72″ x 96″
Another part of the show includes a set of pieces featuring shy or arrogant female figures. They are full of stories and secluded fables, the viewer can imagine many stories, but the artist’s interest does not stay there, it goes beyond, to highlight the human content of each pose and of the imagined environments. These details are what enhance their power, everything seems to be directed toward the spiritual intensity they contain, toward their mystery, toward narratives that are only announced under light and firm lines. The figures loaded with colors impel us to feel them as pure ornaments, although this coloring makes them more expressive, the interpretations that they incite are unprejudiced and calm, they are not subject to the emotional ups and downs of the rest of the works.
While the background of some of the works remains neutral, in others it penetrates the unfolding of the images, it plays no other role than to accompany them, however, with it the artist reinforces that subtlety that characterizes her painting.
In one of the most mysterious pieces, Tenderness, the sketch of a female figure can be appreciated. It is a delicate image, drawn with only a few lines, her hand is on her chest, and she remains half-dressed while her eyes delimit her, standing out with an intensity that evokes suffering, unhappiness, susceptibility, her tenderness does not save her from her pain. In this vein, it is praiseworthy to note how the creator manages to concentrate the meaning of the piece in practically one detail, sustained concomitantly by a simple image that becomes powerful as a result.
Another significant work is Natasha Reclining, in which an attractive woman appears calmly seated in an armchair, with the intention of provoking the observer with her gaze. Once again the gaze acquires a central role, concentrating the power of the work, a power that ramifies as calm, naive, and astute.
Portrait von Jodi is the most daring work of the exhibition, because the woman represented does not seem to care about the events and changes of this world, the attraction from her voluptuousness, her elaborate hair and bold pose make her vigorous, self-confident. The colorful face contrasts with the fine lines in which the body is diluted. The gaze does not forgive a doubter, the viewer must be sure of what they want when they look at her.
On the other hand, in Return to Yellow, a work close to the previous one, the power is concentrated on a face wrapped in yellow, with an expression as disquieting and inquisitive as the above. On this occasion, the lines she draws are governed by color and this makes it stand out within the context of the works exhibited. But something important relates this piece to the others, again, the subtle power of the gaze, which in this case is different from the others, because it is full of doubts, fear, and insecurity about what may be happening.
These readings of some works seek to comment on the different intentions and interpretations that can be provoked, because although they are simple in their composition and brief in their visual solution, they are insinuating and provocative in their meanings. They are silent, insecure, making us think that the destinies that surround them could be dangerous.
The contrast between human values and visual solutions is one of the contributions that the artist has put forward with great skill. When we observe carefully, none of the figures is complacent and this contrasts with those solutions, which in most cases intrigue from their own formal conception by showing a simplicity that supports complex content.
This contrast is one of the most commendable values of the works, which together with the beauty that governs them and the quiet humanity that sustains them, summons the jumble of feelings which so closely reflect our daily life.
Magaly Espinosa Delgado.
Barcelona, Spain, October 2023
Prof. Magaly Espinosa Delgado holds a Doctorate in Philosophical Sciences, with a specialization in Aesthetics, (University of Kiev, Ukraine). Dr. Espinosa is the author of “Indagaciones. El nuevo arte cubano y su estética” (Inquiries. The New Cuban Art and its Aesthetics), a pivotal work that explores the intricacies of contemporary Cuban art. She also co-edited “Antología de textos críticos: El nuevo arte cubano” (Anthology of Critical Texts: New Cuban Art) alongside Kevin Power, a work that has played an instrumental role in shaping the discourse on Latin American art.
Espinosa Delgado, Magaly (2023). In cat. Line and Essence, Exhibition by GG Art Space, Miami, FL, United States of America.
An artist with strong South Florida roots and a profound commitment to her practice, Hollye Davidson is continually involved in a compassionate search for expansive joy that brings a stirring post-contemporary vision of the empathetic power of the canvas to her paintings and drawings. In her figurations, she makes the most poignant statements by employing a simplicity of line that presides over an almost ecological symbiosis of form and color. Over the past few years, she has also been creating bold and sweeping murals that capture this vision with her sincere and honorable treatment of imagined flora and fauna.
Our selection for the present exhibit Line and Essence is centered around twelve major canvases and four focal point works as they dialogue with a commercial urban lobby, a space devoted to transition and transaction. In keeping with the transient environment, the works will be installed in one day and will remain in situ for just twenty-four hours.
Valentia (Courage Horse), oil on canvas, 78″ x 40″
Four canvasses from the Albus series, Frau mit Tiger, Mein beiden Ichs, Eine echte Frau, and Portrait von Lisa, show us captivating, gestural portraiture and bring us directly to the honesty of the artist’s use of line to convey inner states. A companion to these works, the focal piece Tenderness reveals a highly developed example of this style, with line predominating over the remaining formal aspects of the portraiture, such as space or texture.
Frau mit Tiger, oil on canvas, 72″ x 36″
Next, we have chosen four works from the Equinessence series, Valentía, Inertia,Inquisitive Master, and Einstein’s Horse, where one of the most ancient of art historical motifs, the horse, is brought to this space of transit as a monument to mastery and remembrance. Apart from these, the focal work Galliope, naif heiress to Kandinsky’s Der Blaeu Reiter (The Blue Rider), draws us to a nondimensional environment of bare blue that is the only sustenance for our gaze as we commiserate with the movement of a sonsy mare who has cast off her rider.
Artist Hollye Davidson with painting Valentia and the author
Finally, the featured Candessence works, Fearless, Return to Yellow, Portrait von Jodi, and Freed Spirits explore how chromatic essence can lend substance to line and seek to evoke instantaneous emotion in a lithe, sublimated manner.
Fearless, oil on canvas, 48″ x 60″
In a contemporary art world obsessed with conceptual translation, with the need for continual intercessions, indulgences, rituals, and liturgies that convey the intentions of artists to their audiences, Davidson appeals as directly to her viewer as the light will allow. This exclusive showing will be accompanied by the premiere of the immersive exhibition The Stair Pond inside the adjoining staircase.
Gined Lopez Ganem is the Co-Founder of Alberto Puerto Music and GG Art Space, with over 10 years of experience as a university program director and over 20 years of experience as an educator and content creator. Gined has been a contributing author at LnS Gallery, NuFlamencoCollaborative, Cultural Arts Exchange, and other artistic projects. In 2023, she was selected as a recipient of a Chase Breakthrough Grant for minority women founders through Digital Undivided.
At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning -Hokusai
There’s a longstanding joke among the transplanted urbanites of Miami that no one can really be from this town, so, 44 years later, as I resign myself to my adoptive city and truly think about its stories, I’ve come to wonder what became of many artists who lived here before the Swiss-led Baselization that began in the 2000s. Many of these creators were treading both pre-digital and pre-established Magic City waters, and there is no doubt in my mind that much talent had slipped through the mildewed cracks of the wide underutilized sidewalks of our citified suburbs. The last ten or so years of re-discovery of many of these artists, including Purvis Young, John William Bailly, and Gustavo Acosta by art advisors and activists in the region makes it clear that Miami before 2000 was deeply underexposed in terms of its endemic artistic capital. This is the case with the work of Roberto Montes de Oca, a Cuban-born artist who arrived in the region as a youth and has lived most of his life here. A recent visit to his studio revealed
Roberto Montes de Oca with one of his works from the 1980s
the artist’s profound technical abilities, aesthetic curiosity, and discreet mastery of one of the most mishandled areas of artistic endeavor, abstract painting. Characterized by precise technical execution and a distinctive transcultural voice, his works, where abstract expressionism goes beyond “looking for inspiration in” Latin American and Pre-Colombian iconographic histories, and actually subjects the style to their incisive revelations, bring us closer than ever to an honest pictorial language that truly encapsulates the Magic City in the 21st century. Like Hokusai, the artist’s maturity brings him within reach of “penetrating the secret meaning” of each detail of his environment, to describing an experience and urbanity that could only be the product of a lifetime of disruptive and disquieting cross-cultural experiences, that is, the product of a lifetime in Miami.
Sublime Astronomy, 2023
In his latest Dimensions series, inspired by the classic writings of Carl Sagan and the imposing possibilities of the new James Webb space telescope, we are met with this aesthetic discourse, where the amplitudes of space-themed visual language seem to float on and pierce the pictorial memory of the great South American geoglyphs. The paintings evoke a keen sensitivity to how our continuing conquest of space could bring us back around to the intuitive wisdom of this visual history in unexpected, cyclical ways.
Dimensions series, 2023
In general, a walk around Montes de Oca’s studio brings us to a global perspective as if the Nazca lines were our starting point. Every nook is inspired by a different world culture, and yet it seems that this current series is indeed his culminating style. His extensive travels are documented here, and his trajectory has been an immediate affront to the art world paradigm that demands a “consistent product”. Clearly, he has gone his own way, flaunting fads and embracing various styles and techniques along the way. Are we looking at a structural homecoming for Montes de Oca in this present series? Or will we find ourselves surprised again? We’ll have to get to know the artist a bit more to find out. Our interview is below:
Gravitational Collapse, 2023
Thanks for catching up with GG Art Space, Roberto.
Tell us a little bit about your history with the Magic City. When did you arrive in Miami? I came here in 1963, on the very day that I turned 14.
How would you define yourself in terms of cultural background? I would consider myself Cuban, mostly Cuban, and yet I’ve spent so much time here that Cuban-American might be a more apt description.
When did you first exhibit your work in Miami? In the 70s and 80s, I exhibited at the Lowe Museum in collective exhibitions, I had some exhibitions organized by prominent figures such as the architect Luis Alvarez, and I was also able to showcase some works in collectives such as those organized by Miami Dade County Auditorium, among others. I was lucky to be a part of an active group of 8 artists that were featured in several venues around the city at the time.
Time and Space Singularity, 2003
Tell us about your time in the travel industry, what were some of your favorite places to visit? I was involved in the travel sector full time from 1974-1980. Those were some amazing years for me, and I often brought my daughter Amanda along for my travels. It’s difficult to choose, but if I had to, I would say Hong-Kong, Japan, and Thailand had the strongest impact on me.
For how long were you away from painting? Never. I have never been away from or rejected painting, and I have held fast to my artistic practice all these years. I was away from what we can just call the “art world”. For me, it was more of a “good-bye art world” than a “goodbye painting”.
Who would you consider your strongest influences when it comes to abstraction? Well, there is no doubt that it’s all the “greats” from the seeds of the Industrial Revolution artists, through the artists who “made” New York in the 20th century, Rothko, Stella, Pollock, and the rest. Of course there’s Picasso, but he changed the face of the Earth, so of course he inspires all of us as artists.
What do the next few years look like for your artistic practice? As always, I am going to paint what I feel. You’ll just have to stay in touch, and we’ll talk about it again soon over a glass of wine.
There is a ritornello here. A subtext where cultural memory calls us to interact with this piece as improvisational observers for its expression to be complete. This pattern is what makes Locura en la Esfera, 2011 (Lunacy in the Sphere, 2011) by Cuban-born painter Orlando Silvera Hernández at once so familiar, so universal, and so distinctly discoverable.
A vast sphere, marked by painted carnival figures in their most recognizable clown incarnations, beguiles us on this canvas, with the timeless sense of possible entrapment so common to that which is deliberately hidden. Should we uncover these kitschy red noses, or should we accept them as the foibles of fate? The surreal palm endowed with an anthropomorphic trunk seems to challenge such unmasking with a hard stare. And here the improvisational viewer retreats and migrates through the movement of the work.
Detail from Lunacy In the Sphere
Migration. When has this topic been more pressing? Migration strikes at the heart of this canvas. How should we approach a figuration so endemic to a particular isle of the Caribbean when the spheres of the unknown surround so many places? Is our wandering improvisation left to pursue a headless ruse?
Of the Cuban flora and fauna represented in the work, birds seem to have the strongest stories. We are presented with a Cuban tody or Cartacuba, partly supported by a palm frond, various migratory birds, and brushstrokes suggesting wind and flight. Yet the only figure left in full outline is the glittering emerald Cuban amazon with its rose-colored throat, ready to repeat what it must, ready to adapt, to insist on survival, however domestic, however alien. And yet she slips to the wind in her translucence, along with our gaze.
Detail from Lunacy In the Sphere
The ritorno effect brings us back to the carnival, and we shift once again to the realm of sensation, unsure of what is or what will be repeated or re-patterned, persisting in the absence of logic, in the absence of reason, driven to inevitable flight.
