Auction details
May Fine Art Sale
offered by
924 ne 20th ave
Ft. Lauderdale., FL 33304 
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Echevarría has captured the modern urban jumble as frozen fragments of motion. He gives the impression of the momentary revealed by a painting method that has been affected by the technological devices of video, film, and photography, and has become its own unique aesthetic and the image of a counterfeit environment. Echevarría has commandeered the artificiality of the new technology to act in the service of a synthetic reality and as a liberating device from the conventional approach to representation. Reflective, distorted surfaces create multiple layers of refraction and perspectival perversion in the paintings of Ofill Echevarría. His work appears to produce the effect of camera optics manipulating the photographic veracity of figures in motion, architectural reflections, and fragments of urban life. Actually, the effect is entirely invented by the artist with paint, and it is successful due to the very traditional means that inform every step of the process. He begins by making a careful grid to organize the surface of the composition and then draws his image on the grid. This is followed by meticulous oil painting that is a careful subterfuge for what appears to be a blur. A masterful, if covert, composer, Echevarría subtly, perhaps imperceptibly, rearranges the world of the city until he achieves a new order of perceptual reality, disclosing only that which contributes to his personal aesthetic – his artistic interpretation of urban life. Ofill Echevarría studied painting in Havana in the 1980s, where he was a member of the artecalle, a group of mural and graffiti artists considered revolutionary by the Cuban government, despite their non-political, pop culture agenda. He graduated from the prestigious San Alejandro Academy in 1991 and then went to Mexico to pursue an art scholarship. He stayed for almost ten years, before moving to Miami. City life has always influenced his work and in Miami he continues to observe the same urban reality that he experienced in Havana and Mexico City and incorporate his impressions into painting. A quiet, introspective young man, Echevarría is dedicated to exploring the sense of emptiness, anonymity, and alienation that pervades so much of city life. He does so by capturing the city in motion, its inhabitants too impatient and hurried to pause even momentarily; when they do, it is to collapse in a state of total exhaustion. Echevarría's ability to inform his work contextually and intellectually is built upon a firm academic foundation and knowledge of art history, and an absolute dedication to the art of painting. His work is conceptually sound and focused, and with each new foray into his exploration of urban anxiety, he develops innovative methods to convey his ideas in paint. He has considered a number of subjects that relate, or that he has related to the city that have become fundamental to the development of his most recent works and that serve to elucidate their contextual base. In 2000, as a visiting artist at the University of Rhode Island, he presented an exhibition based on the image of the Mona Lisa that was incorporated in a series of small paintings of Mexico City. He chose her familiar face as a timeless icon of beauty that would serve as a unifying aesthetic representing the harmony he feels should be of universal significance in today's frenetic way of life. He has moved beyond such metaphorical devices, although the city remains foremost in his oeuvre. The hectic pace of the city is expressed in his most recognizable images—predominantly described in monochromatic browns and grays—of a businessman, or a fragment of him, in a carefully tailored suit and carrying a briefcase. The color is businessman's brown or gray as much as it is the color of architecture, pavement, and a city whose over-construction has deprived it of sunlight. The man rushes through the streets, the wide-stride of his motion reminiscent of Futurism's assault on the past through the linear intricacy and patterns of repetition that symbolized the present. The figure is often fragmented and is never identifiable. His briefcase is his most prized possession; he is caught in boardrooms, bars, subways, streets, and doorways, the faceless man in the crowd, lost in the pursuit of the daily grind.Echevarría is also in pursuit. To capture his businessman and everything he represents, he invents and reinvents imagery from the past and present. One of his most recent works features an exhausted businessman, collapsed on a bed, briefcase still in hand. His body is dramatically foreshortened, undoubtedly in homage to Andrea Mantegna's Dead Christ (1466). In other works, the businessman is captured in shadow or in the reflection of a pavement's heat or building's windows. He is often fragmented and remains faceless, shimmering in non-stop movement, alone or among a lonely crowd. Occasionally, Echevarría will focus on the briefcase itself, as an icon of modernity. Everything is in constant motion, presented with a rhythmic cadence defined by brushwork and a monochromatic palette, often so distorted that the image borders on the totally abstract. Imagine a plate glass window with a one-way mirrored surface and the cacophony of the city reflected as flickering movement to create its own strange response. Men, women, cars, lights, and the everyday hustle and bustle are elongated, extenuated, diffused and stretched until only the most ephemeral of impressions remains. The more stress, the more attenuated and distorted the images become, and the viewer feels the anxiety of the moment. By the time we absorb what we are seeing, everything has changed—light and shadow, traffic, weather, people, subways—and only a blur remains. Such imagery recalls video and film, with their fast-forward and freeze-frame devices that have long influenced his work and contribute to the optical complexity that causes visual confusion and leads to an abstract reordering of reality. This reordering also takes us back to the original organization of his canvas—the grid that informs the careful arrangement of his subjects, and the frequent inclusion of patterns (the stripes of a bedspread or building systems, for example). Not surprisingly, Echevarría is exploring other ways to impart this new reality through abstraction and in some of his newest work it is almost impossible to distinguish the subject matter as the act of painting takes over the surface effects. He has recently begun to renew an early interest in architectural forms as the basis for his work. Windows appear not only as reflective devices, but also as design elements in buildings to create geometric ordering complicated by the imagery within. In Miami, a city with bright, sometimes blinding light, he has begun to incorporate color to add to the complexity of reflections and movement in the city, and undoubtedly, this will result in new directions. Echevarría works not from one angle of vision but rather from several of the same scene, combining them in various ways until his own composite view has the correct elements of refraction and distortion. He divides the pictorial field (a street scene, building, window reflection, bar, bedroom, etc.) with the grid, applies extreme wide-angle vistas and perspectival devices, changes the image to obscure what is recognizable, and leads the eye into the scene via paint. Echevarría has captured the modern urban jumble as frozen fragments of motion. He gives the impression of the momentary revealed by a painting method that has been affected by the technological devices of video, film, and photography, and has become its own unique aesthetic and the image of a counterfeit environment. Echevarría has commandeered the artificiality of the new technology to act in the service of a synthetic reality and as a liberating device from the conventional approach to representation. Finally, it is through painting alone that Echevarría is able to induce the sense of emptiness, anonymity, and alienation in the crowded environment of the city. His paintings are owned by Merrill Lynch. PLEASE NOTE: * THIS AUCTION STARTS ON SUNDAY MAY 20, 2007 AT 11:30 A.M. EST. ImagesClick on thumbnails to see larger images:
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