Wilfredo Chiesa / IN NATURA

Wilfredo Chiesa In Natura

Wilfredo Chiesa

In Natura

November 1 – December 4, 2019 Alpha Gallery 460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118 info@alphagallery.com www.alphagallery.com

Cover: In Natura, No.1, 2019 (studio view) Oil on Canvas, 72 x 100 inches

“What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.�

Constantin Brancusi

In Natura, No.1, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 72 x 100 inches

In Natura

For many years Wilfredo Chiesa has been accustomed to working in an urban studio, producing elegant abstract paintings, in which narratives are told through line, color and texture. If they could be thought of as landscapes, they were certainly referential to the tones and edges of the urban setting: the canyons and shadows, the pavement and the stone.

More recently, Chiesa has been spending time living and painting in a cabin in the woods near the small town of Inverhuron in Ontario, Canada, and this new proximity to nature has infiltrated his visual language. It took Chiesa by surprise, how much this new environment affected his work, but he soon came to embrace the colors he found in nature – just outside his studio door.

In Natura No. 1, for example, presents overlapping geometrical forms in green, salmon and grey, echoing his wood porch, grass, trees and shadows. One can breathe in the colors like fresh air.

Gone is the brooding quality of some of Chiesa’s earlier work.

Other paintings, such as In Natura No. 8, echo the kind of nocturnal landscape that can only be experienced in the country, away from city lights. Shades of blue and black suggest the waning light at dusk – the quiet stillness that the sun leaves behind.

These new paintings are affirming, with a sense of muted celebration. The artist has gone into nature and nature has thus beguiled.

Joanna Fink, 2019

The studio, Inverhuron

In Natura, No.2, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.3, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.4, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.5, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.6, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.7, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.8, 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

In Natura, No.9 2019 Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20 inches

The Wishing Well

I wish I had a wishing-well, a quiet place for thoughts to dwell.

I’d lower down my pail of woes until a splash be heard below and there they’d float, in darkness damp, my wishes for the well to grant

After a bit I’d tug the rope, hoisting up a load of hope, and in the dripping pail I’d find a tiny new piece of my mind.

A lucent gift from that deep well fragile like an egg’s frail shell

I’d hold it close and let it shine its fresh light on my path through time I’d add it on, just like a bead and let that thread through life me lead

T.S. McLeod

The Miller House garden / Inverhuron

Wilfredo Chiesa was born in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Chiesa has exhibited his work internationally, including over 35 solo exhibitions. He recently completed a large-scale mural commission for the new William Rawn Fine Arts Center at Eastern Connecticut State University. Chiesa’s work is represented in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Ponce Art Museum; El Museo del Barrio, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and the Museo Rayo, Colombia, among many others. Chiesa works out of studios in Boston, Paris and Ontario.

The Miller House / Inverhuron

The Miller House orchard, early spring, Inverhuron

Camille Pissarro, Apple Trees at Eragny, 1895, Private Collection