An artist reception for “Blind Corners, Portals and Turning Points,” featuring works by Linfield art Professor Ron Mills de Pinyas, will be Saturday, Oct. 15, from 2-4 p.m. at the Linfield Gallery. The exhibition opens Oct. 10 and runs through Nov. 12.
The work of Mills de Pinyas has been supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program and exhibited across the U.S. and in Asia and Latin America. His most recent mural series was inaugurated at the Hallie Ford Center at Oregon State University, and supported and administered by the Oregon Arts Commission.
The large abstract paintings in the current exhibit emerged during a stay in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2010-11, where Mills de Pinyas was inspired by the ancient and colonial architecture and patterned folk art and weavings.
The paintings embody the distinct mysticism and romance inherent in a worldview that blended indigenous and Western culture. More recent pieces in the exhibit were informed by the Oaxaca landscape and its botanical structures, but the plasticity is compatible, and so the work reads as an evolving body. With their luminous color, patterns in rhythm and ethereal — almost mystical — flow, the works reintroduce a pictorial sense of figure-ground relationships abandoned some time ago in favor of more pure field compositions.
“Mills de Pinyas’ paintings point to what in creation is tenuous, fragile, even possibly frail in a world of powerful simmering explosions of color and molecular sub-realities,” wrote painter María Isabel Piñas Espigulé about the exhibit.
“The delicate and sometimes daunting balance in nature we sense in the work has nothing to do with insubstantiality, but rather evokes what is truly essential, uncovering the fundamental nature of being beyond individual parts to show true essence,” she said. “We see organic raw material mingled to become enigmatic organisms with self will.”
LINFIELD GALLERY
Exhibitions of regional, national and international stature are on view throughout the academic year in the 1,500 square foot space at Linfield College. Patrons can expect challenging shows that exemplify diverse approaches to the practice of contemporary visual art.
All exhibits are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call (503) 883-2804 or visit the gallery online.
