Homero Hidalgo, Goldmining — Couch in the Desert

Homero Hidalgo, Goldmining at Clark County Library Gallery

By D.K. Sole

For Homero Hidalgo’s MFA thesis show in 2020 he traced shapes from paused movie scenes on top of one another and filled in some of the spaces between the lines to create abstractions. The paintings in this exhibition were not made for that thesis show: a different process of abstraction is in play. But the comparison is valuable because the basic idea is still present–the artist is observing a passing thing, something easily overlooked, and searching for some inherent facet that no one was able to perceive until the artwork pointed it out. Or invented it? The two activities are the same. The paintings are representations of the very specific “this-ness” the artist has discoveredinvented. Each painting is silently footnoted with the idea that no one else could findcreate it, only him.

Goldmining brings the action between artist and object into the foreground by introducing Hidalgo’s self-taken source photographs next to the canvases. In some places the correspondence between them is obvious. There are clear similarities between his shot of a salmon-pink plastic sheet and a field of wide pink brushstrokes in the painting next to it. The way those meshed thick marks interact with one another refers you back to the buckling and shadowing around the creases in the sheet. His act of seeing is proposed as a kind of merger between witnessing and desire: you realise he didn’t want to paint those pink marks until he saw the sheet. (You realise you can also describe the process in the opposite direction: the sheet discovered something in him.)

I can see that once the detail has been picked up, he doesn’t feel any compulsion to make the rest of the image agree with reality. The pink brushstrokes run to and fro in a square with green stripes under it, but there’s no equivalent square in the plastic sheet photo, and the area below the plastic is not green. If I walked past that pink sheet in real life I wouldn’t be able to make the connection that Goldmining gives me. Similarly, if you played his source films next to his thesis paintings you’d never recognise the shapes he chose to outline. Goldmining let you imagine, for a moment, that you’re seeing a process revealed, but as you walk around the exhibition you realise that the revelation is not so simple, you come across places where the connection between the photo and the painting is deeply buried. The pink sheet/pink brushstrokes dichotomy is as overt as it gets. His process is not a mathematical equation in the way a realistic landscape painting can sometimes seem to be (here’s the spot where the painter was standing=the painting is solved). The act of making the pink plastic seen is also the act of swathing it in mystery. The artist makes it undiscoverable without his intervention. Goldmining plays with this multipart process of ownership, claiming, and relinquishment.

Homero Hidalgo, Goldmining
Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Rd.
November 14, 2024-January 26, 2025

Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on January 12, 2025.