The Pastoral and the Celestial: San Antonio

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present The Pastoral and the Celestial, opening on Wednesday, March 20th, with an opening reception from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at our San Antonio gallery. The Pastoral and the Celestial will be on view through May 18th, 2024. The exhibit brings together Richard 'Ricky' Armendariz, Cecilia Biagini, Graciela Iturbide, Nicolas Leiva, and Cecilia Paredes in a celebration of painting, photography, and ceramics, inviting the viewer into a realm where the boundaries between the tangible and the imagined blur.

Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide's cinematic black-and white photographs offer both a documentarian approach as well as a moody, introspective sensibility representive of the sublime. Iturbide artfully creates juxtapositions of traditional environments with peculiar details. Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman in the Desert of Sonora) portrays a woman with flowing locks of indigenous hair making her way through an isolated landscape which contrasts with the modernity of the boom box she carries. The title transforms the figure into a celestial being: we cannot see her face, and she appears to be flying into another realm, arms spread and hair blowing in the wind.

In conjunction with the introspection of the human experience, many artists see wildlife, such as animals and landscapes, as a way to interject into the conversation of environmental stewardship. In her work Armadillo, Cecilia Paredes transforms her body into the form of this fabulous animal; she has a fondness towards marginal beings and animals that are often misunderstood and seen as loners.

Biagini draws inspiration from the movement of the body’s rhythmic contractions while underwater. Utilizing a bold sense of color and line, she juxtaposes chaos and order. Biagini herself says she “cannot avoid the nature of improvising with tools, as she creates a system that allows[her] to work beyond [her] expectations.”

The color blue is employed in various works, with each artist creating their definition. The magnetizing blue tonality used by Biagini in Agua Viva invites the viewer to submerge themselves in a deeper analysis of the painting. 

Ricky Armendariz’s Blue Meditations series turns to the moon to explore the physicality, “The Moon is a familiar character in my work, but this time I distill it down to quick gestural expressions in an attempt to concentrate on drawing and painting as a meditation, a form of healing for the body, mind, and spirit," the artist states.

Ricky Armendariz paints sunrises and sunsets from photos he’s taken, then pairs them with maxims inspired by the “dichos,” or truisms, he heard from his parents and grandparents while he was growing up in El Paso. Although he did not fully appreciate the advice at the time, now he teaches them to his own children, realizing that the short, meaningful phrases are especially suited to a young audience. Armendariz states, “I want people to see the work and say, ‘There’s a sunset and a phrase—how do they relate to each other?’”

Innovative in his use of ceramic and paint on unusual surfaces, Nicolas Leiva works with a vocabulary of pure fantasy and cosmic inspiration. Bright colors and primal designs are the signature result of this artist's expressionistic technique. Embedded in Leiva's collection of forms and surface designs is a symbolic language that contains the narrative of an ethereal realm, but underlying his tales of paradise is a very real physical practice that is social, as well.