Felix Carmelo. Rhythms* (English Version)

 

Felix Carmelo

Felix Carmelo’s artwork reveals his intense esthete’s gaze, forged in a persistent search for the intrinsic beauty of forms. The study of languages derived from geometric abstraction and associated with minimalism, has given him the expressive tools to carry out an artistic proposal that fulfills this fundamental interest. However, the practice of this artist is not merely analytical. On the contrary, it is addressed to recreate the encounter with pure forms and with the rhythms that their relationships produce, in the apparent chaos of the surrounding reality.

Untitled, 2021

Untitled, 2020 (4 pieces)

For this exhibition, the artist started from views formed by the architectural overlaps and interactions—e.g., facades, cornices, gates—of some buildings in Coral Gables, objects, and landscape’s natural elements. These images, captured photographically, offered him a starting point to undertake—via digital or through pencil sketches—a “shape hunt”, executed after a careful looking at each detail. Focusing on those whose aesthetic quality escapes by the naked eye, the artist creates new compositions, accentuating, continuing, or combining their forms and rhythms with those from other images obtained in a similar way. Even these "found compositions" often act as a source for searching new details, in a process that insistently run from the macro to the micro views. The artist's intuition and sensitivity play a preponderant role in this post-photographic exercise of searching, encountering, selecting, combining, and creating.

Untitled, 2021

Untitled, 2021 (12 pieces)

What gives this exhibition its title is precisely that visual rhythm. In the artwork, it is created from the articulation of shapes, lines, spaces, and colors; but it can be also the internal rhythm produced when traveling through the city, concatenating panoramic and quick views, with slow glances at significant nooks. In the end, it is the rhythm that we develop as we go through life—a heartbeat or a pulse—, building order into the chaos, beauty into disproportions, or form into the formless.

Katherine Chacón

Felix Carmelo (Arecibo, Puerto Rico, 1968) is a visual artist based in Miami, Florida. Since he was a child he demonstrated passion and appreciation for design and art. This led him to earn an Architectural Drawing Associate Degree at the Liceo de Arte y Tecnología de Puerto Rico and, later, to study Interior Design at the Miami International University of Arts and Design. His refined aesthetic sense has been influenced by the experiences left by his travels, visits to exhibitions, and a profound love of books. Since 2016 he joined a contemporary artists group called Generación Reactiva, which is consolidated with the support of the Petrus Gallery in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2020 he studied painting with artist and professor Guillermo García-Cruz at the Abstract Art School S35 in Madrid, Spain. That same year, he began artistic coaching sessions with the Venezuelan curator Katherine Chacón. His work is represented in various private collections in Puerto Rico, the United States, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico.

* This essay was written for the exhibition «Rhythms. Felix Carmelo», held at Imago Art in Action (Coral Gables, Florida, USA), from February 20 to May , 2021.