{"id":30142,"date":"2015-10-15T22:38:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T04:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=30142"},"modified":"2023-11-13T16:49:06","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T22:49:06","slug":"now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Now it belongs to the people&#8221;: Juan Pablo Gasca at Charley Hafen Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-30142 gallery-columns-4 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery\/bluegray_blackcomposition\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"290\" src=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/BlueGray_BlackComposition-1-290x290.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/BlueGray_BlackComposition-1-290x290.jpg 290w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/BlueGray_BlackComposition-1-120x120.jpg 120w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/BlueGray_BlackComposition-1-360x360.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery\/cityscape\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"290\" src=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cityscape-1-290x290.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cityscape-1-290x290.jpg 290w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cityscape-1-120x120.jpg 120w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cityscape-1-360x360.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery\/portraitoflucrecia\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"290\" src=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/PortraitOfLucrecia-1-290x290.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/PortraitOfLucrecia-1-290x290.jpg 290w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/PortraitOfLucrecia-1-120x120.jpg 120w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/PortraitOfLucrecia-1-360x360.jpg 360w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/now-it-belongs-to-the-people-juan-pablo-gasca-at-charley-hafen-gallery\/whatdoyousee2\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"290\" src=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-290x290.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-290x290.jpg 290w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-350x351.jpg 350w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-768x771.jpg 768w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-1021x1024.jpg 1021w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-120x120.jpg 120w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-1200x1204.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1-360x360.jpg 360w, https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/WhatDoYouSee2-1.jpg 1800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 290px) 100vw, 290px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>A small oil, less than a foot square, says a lot about the man who painted it. Juan Pablo Gasca, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, but has made his home in the United States since 1998, calls it \u201cWhat Do You See?\u201d The title is no joke; rather, it speaks to the artist\u2019s conviction that what a painting means to the person contemplating it is as significant as anything the maker may have intended. He understands that in an important way, once a work of art leaves his studio, it no longer belongs to him. \u201cNow it belongs to the people,\u201d he says. But \u201cWhat Do You See (No. 2)\u201d also makes a statement about the ultimately abstract nature of all art. Painted in several greens and black, from a distance it makes a strong visual impression that might be bamboo, a forest, or wet fish scales glistening in clear water. Yet, on moving closer to see for sure, the vertical stripes alternate between lying flat or becoming tubes, but in any case are tactile veins of optical data, and finally, paint marked by scraping with a palette knife.<\/p>\n<p>There are as many kinds of abstraction as there are representation, and Juan Pablo Gasca has experimented across the entire spectrum since, as a child, he began to obsessively draw the animals near his home. Guanajuato is home to celebrated cultural events, among them giant public murals and the Cervantina\u2014the international festival celebrating Don Quixote\u2014which bring artists from around the world. But in the 1970s, an indigenous school of art called Mexican Geometricism appeared among the poetry, masks, and other indigenous forms of expression. Although Gasca wasn\u2019t even born when Geometricism was in its heyday, the examples he eventually came across made a lasting impression. The approach to painting he eventually settled on owes much to the fundamental, suggestive, and even fantastical geometric forms that gave so much 20<sup>th<\/sup>-century art a permanent sense of belonging to the future, rather than the present or past.<\/p>\n<p>According to meme theory, certain ideas (or memes) spread like the genes of more competitive plants or animals, traveling from person to person until everyone has thought them. Thus such notions as \u201cphotographs prove nothing in the age of Photoshop,\u201d or \u201ca celebrity is someone famous for nothing more than being famous,\u201d or \u201ca wealthy politician is more trustworthy than a poor one,\u201d each achieve seemingly instantaneous acceptance, regardless of how well they are understood by their hosts. An early, readily-apparent example in art history has to do with Modernism and the perennial avant-garde. Because the best art after 1850 was new work that broke decisively with accepted practice, the connection between quality and being new and iconoclastic soon replaced the previous understanding that art could become better without needing to be all that different. One effect of this meme\u2019s general acceptance has been that the 20th century, one of the richest periods in art history, is littered with wonderful aesthetic inventions that were abandoned before they could be carried through. Some achieved a popular afterlife in spite of mainstream abandonment: Impressionism lasted a little more than a decade at the apex of attention, but hangs on\u2014 among amateurs and illustrators\u2014as the most popular style ever.<\/p>\n<p>So it is that Juan Pablo Gasca recalls the exploration of two- and three-dimensions that began with Cubism in the years before World War I, lost momentum during the war and the Dada and Surrealist movements that followed, but remained influential and eventually became accepted as the last major development in the language of traditional art. One of its most successful proponents, Fernand L\u00e9ger, gradually added figures and urban scenes into his Cubist constructions and became a major influence on Pop Art. In the 1950s, Cubist-influenced architecture, somewhat facetiously known as \u201cBoomerang Modern,\u201d along with forms influenced by Alexander Calder\u2019s mobiles and stabiles, were staples of textile and interior design. It is these engaging and entertaining offspring that are reincarnated in Gasca\u2019s playful style, with its prominent geometric statements and luminous colors.<\/p>\n<p>The central role of color is revealed by many of Gasca\u2019s titles: \u201cUntitled: Purple, Gray, and Yellow,\u201d \u201cBlue, Gray, and Black Composition,\u201d \u201c<em>Arreglo en Color P<\/em><em>\u00fa<\/em><em>rpura<\/em>\u201d (Arrangement in the Color Purple). Colors are the keys on which an artist composes emotional responses, and in fact abstraction\u2019s great claim on art is its immediate accessibility. Its content is whatever feelings it awakens in response. The secret to human thought is the mind\u2019s ability to constantly draw abstractions out of the concrete; then abstract those abstractions further. One result is versatility: a pair of Gasca\u2019s landscapes each features a plump bird next to a sinuous tree, while \u201c<em>El Caracol<\/em>\u201d (the snail) is confined to pure geometry. \u201cPortrait of Lucrecia\u201d reduces the sitter to an anonymous and indeed generic figure in order to emphasize her lips and earring.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, what best conveys Gasca\u2019s sense of joy, of the pleasure he takes in painting and that he wants his audience to find in viewing, is the three-dimensional playground that spills over many of his best works. A piece like \u201cBlue, Gray, and Black Composition,\u201d with its dancing, wavy lines and intermixture of sky and water, plays havoc with the inherent neurology of perception, so that what is solid here is suddenly porous there. Juan Pablo Gasca\u2019s power is to make this look easy, but in fact anyone who has tried to paint such diabolically fluctuating fields knows how hard it is to find dynamic balance in them. \u201c<em>Personaje<\/em>,\u201d meaning person or character, is a distant relative of Picasso\u2019s harlequins, clowns, and musicians, but with the human attributes replaced by angles, boxes, and forms that look solid on one end but become flat, though anything but colorless surfaces on the other. Here reading the tantalizing surface isn\u2019t a step along the way to some higher purpose. Instead, seeing is the whole point.<\/p>\n<p><em>Charley Hafen Jewelers Gallery (900 East 1400 South) features the paintings of Juan Pablo Gasca, beginning with an artist reception on Gallery Stroll, Friday night October 16th, 6- 9 PM.\u00a0 The exhibit continues through Saturday, November 14.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A small oil, less than a foot square, says a lot about the man who painted it. Juan Pablo Gasca, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, but has made his home in the United States since 1998, calls it \u201cWhat Do You See?\u201d The title is no joke; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":30143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[312,2013],"class_list":["post-30142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-charley-hafen-gallery","tag-juan-pablo-gasca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/BlueGrayBlackComposition.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-23 10:20:14","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30142"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70918,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30142\/revisions\/70918"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}