Artist: Antonio Ballester Moreno
Exhibition title: ANOTHER DAY
Venue: Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles, US
Date: February 1 – March 12, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to announce Antonio Ballester Moreno’s ‘ANOTHER DAY’, a series of paintings that suggest a continuation of the artist’s focus in an earlier presentation at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2021, entitled ‘DAY’. As writer Rachel Rose Smith describes it, the “meditative calmness” of ‘DAY’ captures the “events which shape our days, the weights and pulleys through which time takes place”. And certainly, the simple compositions of ‘ANOTHER DAY’ seem to reflect on existence’s worldly machines, namely the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. But to rush to a figurative decoding of Ballester Moreno’s imagery is to miss that his paintings not only flirt with modern abstraction generally but also the analytical, geometric variety specifically, a movement that prides itself for a zealous refusal of imitating the objective world to arrive at a deeper insight into reality and its apprehension.
From Suprematism’s geometric feeling to Minimalism’s primary structures, proponents of analytical abstraction champion art that explores its own synthetic world apart from reality, thereby bringing art to a so-called philosophical ground zero that would drain it of all the preoccupations that tie it to the tastes of an elite audience – e.g., figurative style, expressive gesture, or any other markers of the artist’s hand. And like in previous works by Ballester Moreno, his geometric forms certainly continue to “feel” invested in pushing painting’s philosophical horizon. Ballester Moreno’s compositions are without a doubt severely restrained, distinctive for their arresting greens, whites, and yellows. At first glance, his sensibility resists the hallmarks of a possessive investment in self-expression. For instance, the series’ repetition of circle and section is as mechanical in execution as its implied subject, the Earth’s orbit. And yet, the exhibition’s temporal arc creates an oddly amiable innocence that seems wholly inappropriate for the lofty aims of analytical abstraction.
By comparison, ‘ANOTHER DAY’ is animated by far more playful and outwardly focused interests than the kind that motivated synthetic abstraction’s inwardly directed experiments. To put it differently, Ballester Moreno’s work celebrates wonder, not analysis. And, in this sense, ‘ANOTHER DAY’ calls to mind the kind of jubilance that children express when they discover something new about the world, its shapes, patterns, physics, and structures. Therefore, the exhibition’s innocent simplicity almost strikes one as a kind of nostalgia for comprehending the cosmos for the first time. And this interest in early discovery has long pervaded the artist’s work; for example, his contribution to the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, entitled ‘Long Live the Free Fields’ (2018), included a collaborative installation between the artist and local schoolchildren. The installation comprised of hundreds of hand-crafted clay mushrooms arranged in a mandala-like circle in the centre of the gallery and juxtaposed by educational exercises designed by Friedrich Froebel, the pioneer of early childhood education and inventor of what we now call kindergarten [children’s garden].
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, ANOTHER DAY, 2022, exhibition view, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 13h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 14h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 15h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 16h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 17h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 18h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 19h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 20h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 12h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
Antonio Ballester Moreno, 11h, 2021, Acrylic on jute, 204×149×4 cm 801⁄4×585⁄8×15⁄8 in, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles Photography: Dan Finlayson
