SAÚL ACEVEDO GÓMEZ

Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature

November 12th - December 11th 2022

Swivel Saugerties is proud to present Saúl Acevedo Gómez’s first solo exhibition, Forethought: Last Paintings Of Nature, on view in the Safe Room from November 12th through December 11th, 2022 featuring a suite of Gómez’s new drawings and a site-specific installation. The exhibition’s title derives from Magritte’s 1943 painting, Forethought, which features a multitude of flowers blooming out of a small tree in a vast landscape. The word means, “careful consideration of what will be necessary or may happen in the future.” Acevedo’s work lives in a vacuum of imagination and rumination, where often stark interiors are meticulously rendered in colored pencil that feature recurring shape-shifting objects, characters from pop culture, taunting phrases, and strange trees that warp and twist in abnormal fashions that culminate in brimming compositions.

Acevedo’s practice typically revolves around three concepts; nature, the internet, and the act of art making. He utilizes all three and their relationships to each other as a springboard to purge and navigate, without limitations, the human imagination, both its positive and negative aspects. From this starting point, Acevedo explores subjects such as spirituality, climate change, self-development, art theory, human history, and visual culture. His browser window theater-like sets are a stage that one may surmise is a stand-in for the mind, its actors are at once singular, and plural in the same way that they live inside our being.

We all have a cacophony of voices trapped within that appear to be an endless stream of useless chatter talking over itself, this, as as described in The Four Agreements is the “mitote.” The “mitote” is driven by our false beliefs, self importance, fears, layers of denial and justifications, and like Acevedo’s drawings, they are full of tricks which seem to relentlessly pull our attention in a hundred different ways.

Acevedo grapples with this situation that affects us all in his matrix of illusions which also discharge multitudes of thoughts in a diaristic manner, each work containing a list of notes and scribbles forged in the same palette as the painting it sits underneath. The resonation with us as the viewer is clear, as the drawings act upon us as a mirror in which to reflect on our reality, pleasures, responsibilities, current political situations, climate change, and our role in all of it. They are the result of the human condition living in unprecedented times with an uncertain future, and one which should constantly be questioned.