Alfredo Gisholt: Rituals of Perception at Deborah Colton Gallery
Brilliantly colored small-scale landscapes that call up an acid trip are in fact depictions of the Maine coast line. Mexico City-born artist Alfredo Gisholt spends a great deal of time in Maine. His eyes took in the shore, its rocks, shifting tides, clouds and horizon, light and atmosphere, then filtered the visual data through the imagination to pictorially lay out exuberantly colored, rigorously handled shore images. Landscape elements are too loosely rendered to be recognizable. Yet painting titles such as “Maine Landscape: High Tide,” “Maine Landscape: Dusk” and “Maine Landscape: Storm 2” indicate the art tracked changes in time of day and atmospheric conditions.
The sheer quantity of these hypnotic landscapes makes evident Gisholt’s emotional response to his artistic source and his impassioned dedication to perceiving and experiencing it. But to hell with describing it. That wasn’t the goal. Instead he subsumes it.
“Alfredo Gisholt: Rituals of Perception” through May 1, 2021 at Deborah Colton Gallery includes larger paintings of Gisholt’s studio. These have more subdued coloring and use ramped up abstraction to portray how objects in the studio appear altered by changes in shadow and light during different times of the day and night. Gisholt’s ritual of perception is as immersive in regards to the studio as it is for the Maine coast. He mentioned a couple of times in interviews that he flipped over his studio trashcan to get down to the essence of things. If you were to interpret one of the squiggly marks in a studio painting as a bird, it’s probably a good guess. The master Braque painted a bird in six of his eight studio paintings.
I can’t help but think of Constable who radically reinvented landscape painting, in fact, turned it on its ear. Constable said landscape was another word for feeling.
Gisholt said his art is heavily influenced by Goya. He’s surely referring to the emotional impact of Goya’s art. He also said he draws inspiration from Pablo Neruda’s poetry. In my opinion this is a reference to Neruda’s habit of stacking allusions.
Rituals of Perception marks Gisholt’s second exhibition at Deborah Colton Gallery. Deborah Colton offered up the entire gallery for the artist’s solo show. Gisholt received his MFA from Boston University, and teaches painting and drawing at Brandeis University.