The Habit of shadows...
Levity and Transparencies...
Immateriality...
The motive: The human figure...
The materials: industrial fiberglass nettings, aluminum micro-perforated stripes, metallic mesh, platen and wire. The conceptual axles: transparency, levity and inmaterialness.
Levity and Transparencies
Slight.
(from lat. Levis)
• Light, of little weight.
• Fine, subtle.
• Of little importance, venial.
These beings detaching themselves from the ground, endlessly levitating in a universe of interrogations, who hunt the author, make of Mendoza’s work a chronicle of phantasmagoria and ideas siring from the weight of unceasing everydayness. Levity and transparency play the double game of confirming the irony enclosed in our own identity which fades in precepts, and the possibility of a spiritual universe in men.
As we become translucent, as we become anonymous, as we detach ourselves from daily material we have the opportunity to inhabit contemplative universes, visions of shared loneliness and shadows which we all meet. The invitation of the author is risky in itself, bearing a high content of vertigo, but with the certainty to encounter, in its porous and light mirrors, the universal contents and the deaf scream of humanity.
One of the first approaches of Mendoza to transparency was through the artistic intervention on radiographies. “You look at a radiography and we all look alike in the inside”, says Jonidel himself. With them he aims at looking for a spot of equivalence of the human being from the most elementary architectures, while at the same time relating to the non-conventional materials, in a search for broadening his field of answers.
His encountering with this concept comes from two consequential questions on the emptiness of the anonymous crowds which populate the city. How to trespass the human wall cramming in the horizon? How to turn painting into a process of approaching the others, and the others?
It is there where transparency is the element which defines the human face and figure, but only from a lecture closer to his nature, far from the portrait and the plain representation, acting as a liberator of man prisoner of his own body, jumping over the limitations of psychologies.
Mendoza defines his transparent beings from this image: “One is the shadow of the other; one is no more than the reflex of another” in a clear allusion to the subject of identity and the human race. Ghosts, even in the work of Jonidel Mendoza, cannot escape their human condition.
Immateriality
In Mendoza, the notion of immateriality, his figures, suggesting apparent but not tangible volumes and his spaces, where matter loses ground into emptiness, remind us of some of the expression lines of the work of Jesús Soto who, together with Gego and Manuel Rivera form the trinity of influence on his discourse.
His visual speech lays a wager on the conception of spaces, windows and boxes where volume is just an idea, only a projection of the Being, lacking mass and pretexts. Within these windows and virtual universes, Mendoza carries his drama to painting and generates the paradox: things are not what we believe we see.
On his proposal, he comments: “As I came out of the bi-dimensional plane, color was simplified, figures were simplified; this is why color has no place in my work. Only values, the extreme ones, but stumped, not with a binary sense, but breaking it, striating it. Color creates noise”.
Mirror
“We discovered (in the high night such discovery was inevitable) that mirrors had something monstrous. Then Bioy Casares remembered that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they multiply the number of men”
Jorge Luis Borges
Finally, the work of Mendoza jumps into the introspective and self-questioning process. It assumes painting as a tool which tackles the fundamental questions and elaborates new proposals in order to approach these and the others, in a certainty that we all share the same abysms.
He tells us: “When asked how do I present my pieces? and to people who ask Why the box?” I reply “Because work demands it - “And why is my character so? -and they also ask - why do you hide? I think these are not isolated facts.”
Undoubtedly they are not. The monk of Jonidel Mendoza communicates with the beholder through a pictorial window sharing his ghosts while absorbing ours. The gaze, as a window. The interior search, as a method for the solidity of his personal work.
Jonidel does not believe in ghosts; he believes in humankind, relentless in his searching to rise above human daily misery. He does not cease to look for the ideal window of illumination for the definite target, like the walls of his room, “but sometimes I feel that I am lost”, he adds, while he goes on with his work.
PLASTIC PROPOSAL – Jonidel Mendoza
Ever since I initiated my apprenticeship in the Plastic Arts, I offered myself the opportunity to discover a diversity of materials, observing them from various perspectives.
As I watched the ideas grow and put them in order, I centered myself in the force, the effect and the structural functions of these materials and, from these different shapes I drew out those effects of transparency, levity and immateriality. In these forced searching and transformations of such materials I discovered their limits in their strict assemblies.
Other ideas have been taking shape throughout time, giving me new perspectives on materials, leading me to the stage in which I find myself now.
She - my achievement – in her essential effect, has been showing me her possible encounters, making its own language emerge in the imaginary game of monocromics.
And it is through these extra pictorial materials that I reconstruct and interpret the image of human figure, from inside-out, by means of a moderate usage of planes and pictorial spots of faces and transparent bodies; it is just like introducing an eye in the invisible places of a body in which skin stops being a private surface while it stops being matter and becomes emptiness, shadows or confused silhouettes in the space where they perform.
I complete all this process with drawings, utilizing threads and wires which define the figure by means of essential details by structuring compositional elements, thereby intending to just pretend to gather the aesthetical idea of levitation, of the aerial, of transparency in a human being. In other words, a sort of virtuality of shape and space where the tangible and intangible, the concrete and the abstract, the idea with the shape, are gathered in togetherness.
MAGAZINE: ARTNEXUS
Jonidel Mendoza
Issue #80 Mar - May 2011
Venezuela, Caracas
GBG ARTS: Solo Show
Bélgica Rodríguez
To address the visibility of art appears to be something that is common these days. Rejection of a visual hegemony supported by the strength of the chromatic density of painting and the volumetric nature of sculpture has led to a search for an artistic identity expressed in the deconstruction of the visual space and in the fascination for virtual performances that arouse emotions in the viewer that are tied to his/her own affective self, while also establishing connections with the realities of contemporary individuals. The subject of deconstruction has been, in many instances, resolved through both artistic and philosophical proposals that answer to a correspondence between the time and space inherent in the work itself. In addition, there is the potential of a void capable of generating virtual movement as a result of the interaction between lights and shadows, and of the metaphysical environments generated by the rich translucencies created by the connection between intangible and material optical elements. Surrounding this concept thoroughly researched by conceptual art throughout the Twentieth Century the contemporary artist has tended to favor the autonomy of the visual form by rejecting academic norms. And Jonidel Mendoza has inherited these groundbreaking formal approaches developed in the last few decades.
Mendoza recent exhibition reveals the continuity of a history of the non form From an optical-physical point of view, it is evident that he achieves dematerialization in terms of the representational aspects of the human figure. His production involves rigorously working¿nearly as if he were a goldsmith¿with specific materials, electrically-welded, nylon, or fiberglass meshes, steel cable for electricity, among other construction materials. The nature of his work is removed from the more conventional academic practices¿but not from rigorous artistic creation¿that exhibit the tendency to emphasize certain aspects, such as the importance of color. Mendoza frees the ¿materiality¿ of chiaroscuro through the impact of light and the interior movement of the superimposed planes that exist between the wall and the viewer. At this point, it is important to name some of the leading creators of the Twentieth Century: Jesús Rafael Soto and kinetic art, and Naum Gabo and constructivism, both of these visual storytellers with a poetic of translucencies, lightness, and immateriality¿all of which are attributes at the center of Mendoza¿s conceptual approach. This young Venezuelan artist (1957) creates substantive images that are supported by an aerial space, which he extracts from reality to turn them into ¿ever-changing, always truthful and real [works] as long as they are being used (Gabo).¿ This is how Mendoza constructs artworks that are optically pure and convincing in their physical concretion and how the artist, in the process, has found a new way to conceive of the art of installation.
The other visual motivation in Mendoza¿s work refers to the image without support, a visual proposal that establishes the expansion of the visible and invisible across the horizon in a simultaneous perspective. Drawing within the space is a sensorial and spatial proposal defined by the succession of images on a two-dimensional plane that will always be the wall, which serves as their intangible support or as a mirror that projects them onto the exterior. The works¿all large-size pieces¿included in the exhibition entitled Chiaroscuro showcase the most compelling elements of the history of visual beauty. They justify the transformation of a studio into a large laboratory where the artist explores the behavior of the visual, the mind, and knowledge to conceive ¿figurative images¿ from a new visual universe in which the immaterial, the ethereal, is guided by the equilibrium between ritual and emotional factors. With measurable visual codices, Mendoza is able to concretize his work as ¿art¿ by relying on the artistic logic of combining the academic elements of execution with his non-academic experience, in order to transfer the visual space into the infinitude of virtuality. Through this principle, he establishes the double game of integrating the ¿representational¿ system of the figures¿ hierarchical values with the technical basis and the utilized materials, as the work is divided into a succession of sensorial and normative values directed by several focal points that are perceptible in the visual discourse. Chiaroscuro represents a paradigmatic example of this. It was constructed in accordance with an unconventional perception of art as ¿representation.¿ Mendoza¿s proposal is convincing. The theme leads to the pleasure of ¿seeing¿ the staging of an imaginarium as oscillation among nothing, the being, and art.
MAGAZINE: ARTE AL DIA
Jonidel Mendoza
GBG Arts, Caracas
by Beatriz Sogbe
Giambattista Vico (Naples, Italy, 1688-1744) in his book of 1725, The New Science or Principles of a New Science Regarding the Common Nature of Nations, opposed the criteria of rationalism, in particular the Cartesian destruction based on clear and distinct ideas, as the sole means to know the truth. Vico rejects the linear concepts of history and analyzes it as a movement of “corsi e ricorsi” (courses and returns) based on which civilizations follow one another, each contributing its own identity.
The “corsi e ricorsi” ascend in a spiral pattern, like DNA. And in this aspect, Vico’s thinking is ahead of his time. His is an inclusive philosophy − based on the contributions of a new America, and in which the visionary Vico demonstrates that each nation has its own identity, without thereby denying history or the past. Neither must one deny the place where one lives. It was only well into the 20th century that Vico was acknowledged as an interpreter of the self-determination of peoples and races.
Jonidel Mendoza (Venezuela, 1975) emerges as one of the promising new talents in Venezuelan art. The first images of his work we could observe corresponded to anonymous silhouettes that could be glimpsed through the superposition of metal wefts linked by a support. On an invitation from a gallery, he traveled to South Korea, and he spent two years in this Asian country, where he managed to communicate with the same fluency as in Venezuela. All of which comes to confirm the theory of the Neapolitan philosopher. On his return to Venezuela, Mendoza presented an exhibition in which he eliminated the suppport. The figures were now projected onto the walls. There is no color, only what is essential. There is no specific time; there are no places; there are no language barriers. Communication alone suffices. Communication whose sole interpreter − beyond words and epochs − is sensibility.
Jonidel Mendoza:. Claroscuro
Presented by Art Nouveau Gallery in Miami
June 2-July 16, 2011
JONIDEL MENDOZA: BETWEEN DENSITY AND RESTRAINT
Jonidel Mendoza: entre la densidad y la mesura
SUSANA BENKO.
Texto publicado en el catálogo de la exposición Claroscuro, Galería Art Nouveau, Miami, mayo 2011
© S.B. Derechos reservados
Jonidel Mendoza’s work (MaturÌn, state of Monagas, Venezuela, 1975) stands out because of its coherence. His work has a particular lucidity in which ambiguity allows for an open way to express its contents. It is more than just a way of expression. This is why figurative art has not seized to amaze us over the centuries. It has an unlimited potential for reinvention.
Jonidel's pieces prove this. His work stems from a process of synthesis, which is the product of mature ideas. His pieces focus mainly on bringing back the human figure, not by copying it, not even by creating a possible portrait or reaffirming an identity, but rather as an essence. To talk about essence means to go to the inner most part of the human being. To express this experience requires a simplified and synthetic language. The relationship between form and content shows the same process of simplification-of the means of expression, the materials used in the pieces as well as the search for a spiritual meaning of art. Both planes are handled simultaneously.
Throughout his career, the artist has always shown this desire to show the human presence: by using assembled boxes, first with lights and x-rays that show man in his most organic and transparent humanity, then by using layers of organza or other superimposed materials that show the human figure in the middle of moirÈ effects. In these pieces, the artist insinuates the silhouette by integrating other techniques such as painting or drawing. This process gives birth to his current pieces, which do not have any combination of materials and are freed from the frame. This autonomy is part of the process of synthesis of the artist’s plastic language, because the image stems from the material’s own nature, and is no longer the result of a combination of different materials. There are no apparent substitutions or elements. Paradoxically, there is no ambiguity because the form and the content make up a unity. This is because to express the soul does not require many words.
In this latest phase, which is precisely what we see in this exhibit, the artist gives a lot of importance to the nature of the material used in order to reveal the image. The image is built chronologically through the fabric (the industrial mesh: cease and electrowelded mesh), the line (steel wire) and the dot (tyrap).
We visualize the bodies according to the way the mesh fabrics are superimposed. We see them because of the density of the material, that is to say, according the amount of layers. This generates tonal gradation and transparencies that allow the bodies or characters to have a spatial relationship between them. It is precisely because of the chiaroscuro that this condition is delineated: the darker figures- meaning the ones with more density of material-are on the foreground. The figures with more light appear to be on the background. But this is all an illusion. The artist conquers imperfection and ambiguity, since these are values that are the product of the use of resources and techniques used in three dimensional art, which take on characteristics of two dimensional art: lines, textures, tonal values, transparencies, chiaroscuro. In this case, the image is decoded by superimposition and juxtaposition.
The line, which has been worked on with steel wires, gains value (a word used in lighting terms) because of the folding used by the artist. It is a sculpture with no mass and value drawing at the same time.These steel lines are so expressive and subtle that they seem to take on the liquid quality of the dripping. On the other hand, the chiaroscuro can be seen on the shadows over the wall. The hard consistency of steel is broken by the drill, and with it, Jonidel draws on the space and creates faces and characters whose bodies are full of emptiness and look attentively at us, follow us and get us involved.
The artist goes from the line and the composition to the dot or the stain. The capacity of association of these forms is essential for the completion of the work. The tyrrap dots that are adhered to a transparent nylon mesh make sense if we look at the piece from certain a distance. This is the only way we can see the bodies. We can try and understand the piece in a similar way we would an impressionist painting. The space is needed because this is how the figure can be seen. The chiaroscuro in this case depends on the lower or higher concentration of dots. These pieces are atmospheric and sensorial.
In these three formal methods, the space is used as support and as matter at the same time. This is part of its ambiguous nature. From this perspective, is possible that each piece has a multiple sensorial resonance, which is possible thanks to the restrained density of elements and silence.
Fotografías de exposición Claroscuro en la Galería GBG Arts Gabriela Benaim, Caracas, 2010, cortesía Jonidel Mendoza:
http://www.arteenlared.com/mundo/estados-unidos/jonidel-mendoza-expone-su-serie-claroscuro-en-miami.html#.ThoN1rHTbAc.facebook
Jonidel Mendoza
Venezuela, Caracas
GBG ARTS: Solo Show C L A R O S C U R O
Chiaroscuro
By: Félix Suazo
"A person is just an abrupt cut in a flow, a point of departure for a producion of flows and a point of arrival for a reception of flows. Or else, an interception of many flows (...) of all kinds". Gilles Deleuze.
The motive: The human figure, the materials: industrial fiberglass nettings, aluminum micro-perforated stripes, metallic mesh, platen and wire. The conceptual axles: transparency, levity and inmaterialness. Thus briefly enumerated, these are the elements from which Jonidel Mendoza's work is projected (Maturín, 1975). Obviously, his searching exceeds the quality of the physical support which he uses as a vehicle as well as the significance of the terms he utilizes to refer his activity. His work is a combined practice, arousing from crossing lines in which drawing, assembling and setting up ends up placed into a zone which fluctuates between the objectual and the spacial area.
Nonetheless, just at the moment it seems all has been said, one's glance is submerged in a weaving of overlapping lines whose density intensifies or decreases in strategic areas in order to grant a "body" to elusiveness. A configurating screen in which what is visible shows an ambiguous searching for plenitude in the illusoriness of chiaroscuro. There the eye entangles, loosing its path and then finding it once more, jumping from one trace to the other, calibrating distances to finally reset the scene which summoned it. Such is the path demanded by this game of weightless glazes.
Mendoza, just as many as his generational counterparts resumes and re-dementions some of the proceedings and vernacular modernity, denoting an explicit connexion with the atmospheric pathos of the "Reveronian" painting, the paperless drawings of Gego and the writings of Jesús Soto. And, let us add to that, the interest which his boxes and transparent mirrors attracted, all made with metallic mesh by the Spanish informalist Manuel Rivera. He inherits, from all these seminal lections, a taste for naked structures flung into emptiness, striving to be free from disciplinary atavisms in an effort to trascend the bounded regularity of the plane.
Beyond the delimitating function of the frame and further ahead of bidimensional surface, these pieces only show unaccomplished faces and silhouettes . They are creatures of evanescent appearance, just portraits of a threatened existence protecting itself from indiscreet or pernicious incursions behind fences, grills and curtains. The individual_whether isolated or diluted into a crowd_is just a quasi-corporeal suggestion entrailing the mark of confinement. Everything else -windows, walls, buildings- has actually disappeared except for these imperfect figures made with the débris of an insecure society, as if that armor made of entangled wires had set in the inner-self of the subject.
Paradoxically, the characters of Mendoza do not overact their condition nor manifest any emotional preference. Here we find no weaning nor euphoria, just a "flow of opacities" where the real drama lays in the conflict between suspension and gravity. Basically, this is about contrary forces whose reasonale articulation in space allows to mitigate any overflowing expression, above all in works which do not maintain an analogical relationship between the model and its representation.
Definitely, Mendoza proposes an excercise of "failed specularity" in which the image is revealed as a precarious and ambivalent construction. From this perspective, the distinction between the inner and the outside remains postponed while the work becomes something permeable and mobile. Thereinm, in the midst of these coordinates, the idea of a body adopts the configuration of an emerging presence, torn throughout by flows of an unprecise codification.
Caracas, September 2010.
FERIA IBEROAMERICANA DE ARTE 2011 - CARACAS - VENEZUELA
PIEZA DE TY-RAP DOBLE CARA, GALERIA GBGARTS CARACAS
Jonidel Mendoza. Claroscuro
"Jonidel Mendoza's work stands out because of its coherence. His work has a particular lucidity in which ambiguity allows for an open way to express its contents. It is more than just a way of expression. This is why figurative art has not ceased to amaze us over the centuries. It has unlimited potential for reinvention.
Jonidel's pieces prove this. His work stems from a process of synthesis, which is the product of mature ideas. His pieces focus mainly on bringing back the human figure, not by copying it, not even by creating a possible portrait or reaffirming an identity, but rather as an essence. ‚In this latest phase, which is precisely what we see in this exhibit, the artist gives a lot of importance to the nature of the material used in order to reveal the image. The image is built chronologically through the fabric (the industrial mesh: cease and electrowelded mesh), the line (steel wire) and the dot (tyrap)." Susana Benko
JONIDEL MENDOZA
The Habit of Shadows
His weightless figures detach themselves from the whites of the non-identity, the no-place, the not-being. He portraits faceless multitudes of the metropolis opening windows to the deaf screaming of the Being. It is no wonder that before reaching his thirty years of age, this shadow hunter may think that his chromatic horizon includes nothing further than the outline of nothingness.
Shadows
The first place where Jonidel lived in Caracas was the basement of a serigraphy atelier in “Monte Piedad”. He came from “Punta de Mata” to initiate his studies in the Plastic Arts in the “IUESAPAR” and was looking for a place that would suit his budget. This fact, beyond the mere anecdote of a recently moved student to the capital and a few drinking bouts with friends, was a turning point in the search of Mendoza as an artist and in his relation to the materials which, from that moment onwards, would give shape to his pictorial engineering.
If we pay some attention to this scenario, we shall see how humidity, the translucency of the serigraph canvas, the light filtering from the streets, the shadows inhabiting the precinct and the loneliness of that young man, just barely confronting the metropolis, were shaping more than a picture, but rather a situation that could form an artistic personality which recalls the old eremites and other monk habits…
Because not only the aesthetics of the shadows, their elevation and transparencies and the Being, stumped in overlapping perpetual and flat whites are the only game played by Mendoza. One should auscultate his primary principles, the metaphysics of the borders and the mirrors just in order to approach the aerial plane of a painter who assures that he would not be surprised to end up painting whites over whites.
HUMANITAS ARS* (MUSEO DE ACARIGUA - ANARE VENEZUELA)
LA FIGURA HUMANA EN CINCO NUEVOS CREADORES VENEZOLANOS . CURADOR: ALI CORDERO CASAL
