| Monique Prieto |
| |
Prieto's
flat shapes are painted in sweet, pure colors on
canvas as bare as a schoolgirl's knee. In Jet
Stream, a pale blue, armless womanlike sculpture
takes up most of the length of the frame, and on
top of her head, a few globs of more intense
color snuggle together like worms hanging out on
the edge of a cliff. One, an orange ball, lets
spill a controlled drip down the side. Whereas
Elrod's cloned kinetic scribbles hang in the
virtual space of a video screen, Prieto's are
always affected by gravity. Yet her areas of
color, however blobby, have some of the qualities
of hard-edged painting, scrupulously refusing to
overlap no matter how closely they touch. Despite
their uncompromised flatness, they manage to
create a palpable pictorial space. In Chronicle,
three figures seem to live in a balloon of bouncy
smog. While Elrod's paintings are weird and
impenetrable, Prieto's are strange only in their
unabashed lovableness.
"What's So Great About Painting"
by Shaila Dewan |
|
|
|
Stream
of Consciousness presents the work of eight Los
Angeles artists in the early stages of their
careers. Amy Adler, Jeff Burton, Steven Criqui,
Todd Gray, Joe Mama-Nitzberg, Dave Muller,
Monique Prieto, and Frances Stark all make
striking and powerful pictures that blend formal
innovation, conceptual complexity, and charged
subject matter. "Stream of
consciousness" aptly describes how these
artists interpose elements from different
categories of experience and transgress
boundaries of medium, style, genre, and meaning.
Elizabeth A. Brown,
Curator
|
|
Monique
Prieto was born in Los Angeles where she lives.Prieto
has shown throughout the US, in London, Basel,
Denmark, Italy and Germany. She is represented by
ACME Gallery in Los Angeles, and Corvi-Mora in
London.
|
images courtesy of Tommaso Corvi Mora, London |
| |
postmedia
|
|
|
 |
| Souvenir
& Particle, 2000 |
| |
David
Pagel: "Do you think of the shapes in your
paintings as characters or landscape elements or
both?"
Monique Prieto: "Each shape represents a
character, a feeling, or an object, or some
element that has a definite purpose ofr being
there." DP: "But how important is
for the viewer to..."
MP: "To know what those things are?"
DP:
"Yeah."
MP: "Not important at all. I try to give
something in the way that they're rendered, but
indirectly. And I try to put something in the
titles, but I feel that that could limit the work
by giving away too much. Painting has such a
great ability to give a lot on its own, and so I
play with that, its generosity, I try not to
stifle it by imposing too much of my own little
narratives. Though I most definitely need them in
the paintings - they give me a
purpose.[...]"
(Excerpt
from an interview with David Pagel published in
BOMB, Summer 2000)
|
| |
Moonlighting
& Psychic, 2000 |
|
