About the New Works

Rubio Huidobro’s new series fuses three approaches to painting today: a reinterpretation of the space and surface of painting since abstract expressionism, an appropriation of pop playfulness and color, and a restatement of painting’s emotional power in a post-digital and flat-screen world.

Rubio Huidobro’s paintings often read like maps of today’s visual and emotional sensory field. Conscious of the situation of painting in a post-digital visual context, Rubio Huidobro began a series of compositions as computer-manipulated abstractions that served as studies for his paintings on canvas. Color saturated to recharge our media-numbed visual receptivity, the paintings lead us away from computer and TV-screen flatness to a renewed awareness of depth and surface. The new canvases are in essence contemporary baroque works that can be called a new anti-flat style.

Rubio Huidobro positions his new work at the intersection of several painterly questions and approaches: Pollock’s all-over technique, but in a deliberate, un-Pollock painterly application of acrylic and oil; Clyfford Still’s color field discoveries, but with un-Still pop bravado; the color bursts of late Whistler; Roy Lichtenstein’s outlined, pop brushstrokes, but without relying on the ironic icon of the expressionist brushstroke; and the post-pop “super flat” style and colors of Murakami, but rendered back with renewed attention to surface and depth.

Many years a Washington, DC resident, Raimundo Rubio Huidobro now lives and works in Brooklyn. A classically trained painter, he has been working recently through post-surrealist and color field abstraction toward a new approach to surface, depth, and color. His new work represents a major breakthrough in mapping out new possibilities for painting today.

Works in Museum Exhibitions

Rubio Huidobro’s work is currently contextualized within post-digital painting in the Surface Tension show at the Chelsea Art Museum, curated by Manon Slome. He was also included in an exhibition for the 2002 Biennial of El Museo del Barrio in New York. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington recently acquired a work which was included in a recent installation of works from the permanent collection curated by Jonathan Binstock, Earthly and Spiritual Pleasures: Works from the Collection (2003) (see installation view in our Newsletter 1.20.4).