García Ponce moved from figuration to abstraction after coming into with the aesthetic avant-garde of the early 20th century in Europe. As can be noted in "Untitled" (1968), Cubism was one of his greatest influences with respect to the composition of geometry in relation to space, an interest that he explored and which marked much of his work. This was due to its close relationship with architecture and because of his constant search for the possibilities that the media and pictorial language offer.
In this piece, plane and geometric figures disobey the perfection demanded of them as objects of mathematics. They even go against the perspective of traditional painting: lines, shapes and space do not respond to a rational logic. Sometimes they seem to overflow, to come out of the canvas itself and oppose each other on different surfaces, just the way things happen in natural order. As García Ponce himself states, "My abstract compositions are influenced by everything I observe in nature, such as trees, for example."
The artist's vision of nature was related to imperfection and the way it expressed itself randomly and unintelligibly to human understanding, but close to what he could understand as a painter. If from cubism he took the freedom to decompose the white canvas; from organic life, the manifestation of things in their own dimension, a characteristic of his pieces that the researcher Rita Eder called "geometric expressionism", that is, the understanding of natural forms from their own way of being and from the most emotional conception of the artist as a human being.
Furthermore, in "Untitled" (1968) one can also find reminiscences to the work of the German dadaist and constructivist Kurt Schwitters, as is the case in most of García Ponce's abstract work. According to Esteban García Brosseau, García Ponce established a dialogue with Schwitters' painting based on the constructivist style that promulgated the relationship between architecture and technology. In this way, architecture and painting, nature and the artificial, meet to form the space that the artist conceived.
Bibliography
Esteban García Brosseau, “Reflejos y parentescos.” (Reflection and kinship) https://www.academia.edu/16224413/Reflejos_y_parentescos
Juan arcía Ponce, “Fernando García Ponce” (2006). Available at http://www.fernandogarciaponce.com/publicaciones
Roberto Vallarino (coord..), Fernando García Ponce: La atracción por poblar el vacío (Fernando García Ponce: The attraction of populating the void). Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2002.
García Ponce moved from figuration to abstraction after coming into with the aesthetic avant-garde of the early 20th century in Europe. As can be noted in "Untitled" (1968), Cubism was one of his greatest influences with respect to the composition of geometry in relation to space, an interest that he explored and which marked much of his work. This was due to its close relationship with architecture and because of his constant search for the possibilities that the media and pictorial language offer.
In this piece, plane and geometric figures disobey the perfection demanded of them as objects of mathematics. They even go against the perspective of traditional painting: lines, shapes and space do not respond to a rational logic. Sometimes they seem to overflow, to come out of the canvas itself and oppose each other on different surfaces, just the way things happen in natural order. As García Ponce himself states, "My abstract compositions are influenced by everything I observe in nature, such as trees, for example."
The artist's vision of nature was related to imperfection and the way it expressed itself randomly and unintelligibly to human understanding, but close to what he could understand as a painter. If from cubism he took the freedom to decompose the white canvas; from organic life, the manifestation of things in their own dimension, a characteristic of his pieces that the researcher Rita Eder called "geometric expressionism", that is, the understanding of natural forms from their own way of being and from the most emotional conception of the artist as a human being.
Furthermore, in "Untitled" (1968) one can also find reminiscences to the work of the German dadaist and constructivist Kurt Schwitters, as is the case in most of García Ponce's abstract work. According to Esteban García Brosseau, García Ponce established a dialogue with Schwitters' painting based on the constructivist style that promulgated the relationship between architecture and technology. In this way, architecture and painting, nature and the artificial, meet to form the space that the artist conceived.
