CARLO ERNANDE
Developed a passion for art and music at a young age. By the time he reached his teens, he already mastered the conventional techniques of painting and drawing. His interest in the visual arts deepened as he matured and began to travel, and his formal training expanded beyond Latin America to the United States and Europe. Although his reputation continued to grow, Ernande became increasingly uncomfortable in solo or group exhibitions, which he compared to a competitive sporting arena.
After his last art exhibition of 2006, he devoted his time solely to the studio in southern California. Ernande's work is distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and color relationship; his subtly abstract paintings, though shaped within a somewhat realistic or formal structure, are like improvised riffs of colors and shape that explored the nuances of patterns, layers and visual rhythms. His unique style combines European modernist influences (Hans Hofmann and Paul Cezanne; Latin American artists Fernando De Szyszlo, Rufino Tamayo) and pre-Columbian times from his country's own indigenous cultures. Each new viewing of his work reveals fresh discoveries.
Statement:
On Content
I am interested in the tension, composition, achieved through the handling of paint and juxtaposition of color, like the interplay of notes or chords in music.
On Process
The development of a painting is built up in stages when I add a new element, it calls for changes elsewhere on the canvas. I like to rework continuously. The painting may repeatedly dissolve and transform itself in unexpected ways. But at each stage it must function as a whole organism. Only then I can add to it. If a painting loses its unity, I have to take it back to the point where it was still unified before I can go on. The work is difficult. Each painting presents unique problems.
On Subject Matter
Pictorial structure, spatial tensions color, line and volume relationships.
Key Ideas
• Ernande’s philosophy and the core of his identity is most clearly revealed in his painting The Idea of Latin American Cultures. To him, represented solitude, independence, courage, spirituality, strength. A tendency that manifests itself in his use of colors, displays of passion, and personal display.
• Ernande is a noted artist for his high standards who began drawing and painting at the young age of 6. Although described by some as a hermit and a recluse, others argued that Ernande lives a solitary existence but shared himself with others through his paintings. Friends described him as warm and pleasant, He is recognized to simply not show up for exhibitions when he is the feature artist.
• Ernande as a working artist, he is going to be spending a lot of time alone in solitude. It’s necessary and important to his creativity and to getting the task of painting done. It is the place in which his creative genius is unlocked and in which his paintings will flow forth.
Carlo Ernande‘s paintings explore the tension between colour and form, the pictorial plane a confabulation of experiments, each seeking to find unity through texture and the juxtaposition of colour, his pictures opening up an abstract space in which he, and the viewer, are encouraged to delve into the myriad of layers, each one a riff on the one before it. A gradual building of sediment. A history of sorts.
Playing with his own visual cultural history – in particular pre-Columbian and Latin American architecture, textiles and ceramics – and that of the European modernists such as Hans Hofmann and Paul Cezanne, Ernande has created a new, vibrant visual language that bridges the past and the present, the Americas and Europe, each painting a bridge to a new place, an unknown landscape that is rich in pattern, colour and rhythm.
These paintings evoke a sense of solitude and cultural and linguistic isolation, a coming into existence and extinction and above all the beauty and mystery of pre-Hispanic culture tempered with a modern artistic language. It is image making of its time, a reflection of the global reality we live in, a melding of cultures and time into a form that is both of the now while simultaneously reflecting what went before. A tension between freedom and control.
• Ernande has constantly defied aesthetic boundaries in his work, extending the visual vocabularies of painting through a mercurial working process. His investigations into the effects that can be achieved by embracing a vast range of materials, pictorial sources, and art practices. Within his wealth of material can also be found mystery—he is frequently called difficult to interpret or understand. Over the past forty years, he has created a body of work that continues to provoke respect and warm approval by private art collectors.
. Painting is, above of, deeply relating to, or affecting the man's soul as opposed to material or physical things for Ernande. He seeks to communicate a message profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
. Highly informed by Latin American history mythology, and his Peruvian-heritage, Ernande's art was profoundly imbued with an emotional content that he articulated through a range of styles that evolved from figurative to abstract.
His search for new forms of expression led to his strong color painting, which employed shimmery color to convey a sense of spirituality.
Ernande maintained the social strong ideas of his youth throughout his life. In particular he supported artist's total freedom of expression, which he felt was compromised by the market. This belief often puts him at odds with the art world establishment, leading him to publicly respond to critics, and refuse commissions, sales and exhibitions.
. A prominent figure among the Latin American painters, Carlo Ernande's art evokes the beauty and mystery of pre-Hispanic culture with a modern artistic language.
Moved through many artistic styles until reaching his signature motif of rectangular forms floating in a stained field of strong and pure color. Influenced by pre-Columbian and Latin American cultures mantels, textiles and ceramics as well as the composition of ancient ruins of Latin America, these influences have enriched his work, he was insisting that his art was filled with content, and brimming with ideas.