Albert Contreras at Bill Maynes - New York - painting exhibition - Brief Article

These gummy, pearlescent paintings, all untitled and all from 2001, were done by a Los Angeles native returning to painting after a 25-year absence. As the story goes, Albert Contreras was absorbing Goya and Velazquez in Madrid during the 1950s, then spied a Swedish woman and ended up spending 10 years in Stockholm. He showed in the galleries there throughout the 1960s; his work from that time is in virtually every Swedish museum.

By 1972, he had returned to Los Angeles and soon stopped painting, as he had pursued a reductive idiom until his work literally disappeared. But Contreras kept up with art during his long hiatus. He resumed painting in 1997, but his recent work appears to have picked up at a stylistic moment in the now very cool 1970s. All the concerns of painting from that time are in evidence: the grid, thick paint, lyricism, the "decorative" and iridescent acrylic. Contreras's own eccentric vitality is bound up in that style, along with a more contemporary tendency toward synthetic color and the allure of semitransparent plastic.

The paintings are small, mostly 20 by 24 inches or 12 by 14 inches, and Contreras accentuates their objectness by using stretchers approximately 2 inches thick. The paint is bulked up with some clear additive and has palpable body (I thought of face cream or machine grease); precisely sliced dollops of it stick out from the surface like studs on an armored breastplate. A solid-color ground is applied--or more accurately, iced--with a spatula. Once the ground hardens, Contreras builds up a polychrome pattern of stripes, checkerboards, tilted Deco-ish plaids, diamond patterns or grids of tiny cubes. The eye is met by a topography of dimpled jujubes of paint regimented across shiny surfaces.

Contreras is an endlessly seductive colorist. In one 12-by-14-inch painting, a luminous caramel-gold background supports a tiny gridded network of dullish, dental-silver cubes. Another version of the same pattern uses iridescent egg yolk with an aftershave ice blue. The largest painting in the show, a 24-by-36-inch work, features semitransparent rectangles of gelatinous burgundy that stand in rigid lines across a black, glossy ground. In several very recent paintings, Contreras abandons his two-step process and smears paint on like cream cheese, shaping poisonous mustards, jade greens and bronzes into a diamond grid of metallic colors in close tonal proximity. At first glance, because of the smaller scale of these works, one thinks of gift- box covers, candy or jewelry, but these paintings reveal a more pugnacious, dangerous charm, like a drugged gangster, giddy with pleasure.

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