Elder Gallery
presents

Javier Lopez Barbosa
Solo Exhibition

During the month of February Elder Gallery in Historic SouthEnd District presents its second solo exhibition for Santa Fe artist, Javier Lopez Barbosa. An opening reception will be held on Friday, February 1st from 6 to 9 pm.

Of his paintings, Barbosa states "I want to leave complete interpretive license to the viewer. I may end up seeing a figure or image after I'm finished, but it is never a conscious decision. Bring your own emotion and see it, experience it as only you can."

As a child in Monterrey, Mexico, Javier López Barbosa grew up in a culture that appreciated color and celebrated it vibrantly in fashion, cuisine, entertainment, architecture, music, and certainly in fine art. López Barbosa has mined that rich background for inspiration and refined it into paintings that offer unique and fully arresting experiences in contemporary abstract art.

Barbosa is an original painter with a unique artistic vision and a substantial technical arsenal at his command. He maximizes the effects of color and intrinsic light by submerging interesting forms and textures under layers of clarity-enhancing mediums. His formidable set of application techniques gives his paintings a quality of exhilarating visual depth.

As he works, Barbosa stokes his emotions by listening to the mostly classical and operatic music he loves. "I don't have a specific message in mind when I paint. I start with a really good feeling but I am otherwise blank. The canvas tells me what to do."

Barbosa knew from a young age that his destiny was to be an artist and also that the journey to fulfillment would not be without obstacles. His grandmother was an opera singer, which afforded him early exposure to music and art. Around the age of five or six, his father asked him what he wanted to become in life and was horrified to hear "artist" instead of "engineer." His father never quite understood the murals young Javier painted on the walls of his bedroom. He wanted his son to be anything but an artist. How would he pay his bills? How could it be better and more secure than coming to work for his father?

At the age of 22 Barbosa moved to San Antonio to assist his artist brother-in-law, a job that eventually took him to Santa Fe, where he could finally fulfill his dream.

"I paint what I feel. When I was still struggling I remember having lunch with a more classically trained artist who advised me that I really needed to go to art school," the painter recalls. By remaining self-taught, he has been able to formulate and adhere to his own instinctual philosophy of art and to devise his own technical procedures.

Analogies to music suggest themselves in Barbosa's paintings. Listening to operas and classical music while he paints, he translates that aural experience into abstract visual equivalents of phrasing, tempo, rhythm, and dynamics. Javier also has a distinguished background as a performing artist. For six years he was lead tenor in a Spanish opera company called La Zarzuela de Albuquerque, which fulfilled another of this passionate artist's childhood aspirations.

The exhibition runs through March 1, 2008.

Scroll down to view partial list of painting in exhibition.