FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
PASCUAL TARAZONA is undoubtedly a material man. Acclaimed in the 1970s and 80s as an award-winning designer of beautiful clothes for equally beautiful women, the Spanish- born artist’s love affair with sensual, layered textures continues into his his painting. And in his most recent body of work currently on display at the Open Window, the physicality of his abstract innerscapes overrides their metaphysical nuances.
With the pendulum of contemporary art discourse swinging between figuration and conceptualism, it has become almost obligatory to dismiss abstract expressionism as being out of time and out of place. But Tarazona is unashamedly impervious to the dictates of fashion. He would be the first to admit that he is still a toddler in art years, even though his resum suggests a modern-day Renaissance man who has dabbled in many forms of cultural expression.
Called Vistas, this show represents a radical departure from Fragmentations, his solo show at the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery in the early 1990s. There, his photographic collages were romantic, slick and rich in detail.
Yet they remained stuck in a clichd designer-art mode. His current innerscapes reveal a more liberated imagination, and a visual expression less dependent on fulfilling a policy of surface saturation.
Divided into two series, the Vistas and Vessels, the latter’s concerns are with balancing the masculine and feminine selves and to invert traditional roles played by the sexes. This is conveyed through imagery such as upturned military helmets and phallus-shaped vessels.
The vistas try to provide windows on to psychic landscapes, or innerscapes of sorts. But even though Tarazona attempts to invest his works with metaphysical lining, one is left primarily with a sense of their materiality, their decorativeness and the way in which they seem to shimmer from the effect of light refracting off their sand and acrylic surfaces.
Vistas and Vessels is on show at the Open Window gallery in Pretoria until May 13