LOUCHE OPS                                                       

 Louche Ops is pleased to present Hydra (or downtown), an exhibition of recent work by Antonio López. 
López's paintings respond to traditions that consider the polemic of autonomy through fragmentation. In their layers of pictograph and gesture, his works allow for a collapse of the categorical differentiation between the symbolic and the indexical. What's been painted, sometimes in density, at other times austerely stark, converges as strata. They're reminiscent of a gap dissolve, where one scene from a film fades into the next, and for a brief moment the screen holds the overlay of two distinct yet conflated pictures. But in painting, unlike cinema, nothing is ever coming or going, and this chimerical image is the soul remainder. 
The works are painted on large, geometrically irregular sheets of paper roughly cut from a factory roll. The limits of a support that ripple and fold are challenged by the paint and the pvc ground that's between the paint and the paper. In several instances it appears that the media is dictating the structure of the support through its calcification. Although the concept of subsection is conventionally equated with volume, here it's a model tailored to the space of the pictorial gaze. Far from ornamental, yet geologically forensic and oddly luminous, the paintings take on the lapidary qualities of a geode exposed by a cut. These convey themselves through a covering and spilling over of the fertile incompleteness they elicit as signs, like a page of time that whistles through us. 


James Krone 
Feb. '24