SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art is presenting Dreamers and Realists, a group exhibition featuring Jesse Amado, Andrés Ferrandis, Cisco Jímenez, Nicole Franchy, and guest artists Kaela Puente and Alejandro Augustine Padilla curated by Jesse Amado.
Amado is known for art that is conceptually based and highly formal. Well respected for his artistic practice and situated within the main stable of Ruiz-Healy Art’s roster, Dreamers and Realists situates Amado in a new role at RHA as guest curator expanding on his mediums to encompass the dialogue that curating conjures for the audience. Amado, however, does not call it curating, rather he prefers the term "tailoring."
Amado states: "I set out to assemble a group of artists who address reality as a dreamer. The title should read as artists who are both dreamers and realists, and not either / or. The work is tailored to this notion.. it is clear, bright and detailed. It was discovered recently that 1200 planets are inhabitable...it's just art but it is something astonishing to look at."
Artists have been curators long before the position existed formally and are perhaps best at understanding arts relationship to the world. Fluent in the creative vernacular, Amado arranges four artists that RHA currently represents with two guest artists for a wonderful juxtaposition of artistic practices.
Andrés Ferrandis is experiencing a stylistic shift. Ferrandis is known for his meticulously crafted collage-based works that are cut with precision and exude imagery based in reality. Recently however, the artist seems to be freeing himself from such confines. Although many works are abstract, they are redolent with the traces of perception. Ferrandis opens pictorial pathways that lead to the personal interpretation of moments, memory, and essence.
Cisco Jímenez was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He attended the Instituto regional de Bellas Artes and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana before moving on to study with Bruce Dorfman and Jose Manuel Springer. He was also one of the first Artpace International Artist-in-Residence in 1995. In this exhibit, collage works collide realities of consumer culture with organic and labyrinth line works.
Nicole Franchy’s artistic practice is based on – and embedded in- the increasing mobility of people, objects and ideas. Using images related to history, memory and travel, she meticulously composes collages and installations that investigate how socialites are shaped by physical and virtual movements on both a global and a local scale. Moving between archival and fictive representations, her work confronts parallel realities and explores the luminal space of boundaries and frontiers. As such, it projects associative landscape and dream-like panoramas that propose a new geography.
Kaela Puente is one of the guest artist's Amado selected for this exhibition. She is from San Antonio, Texas and just received her M.F.A. in ceramics from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her B.F.A. from the University of the Incarnate Word in 2013, where she concentrated on both painting and ceramics. Puente utilizes both realism and fantasy in her artworks. The ceramics and paintings both explore bold colors and patterns, while the unique canister-shapes of her ceramics appear to be contemporary takes on ancient Egyptian canopic jars.
Alejandro Augustine Padilla is another guest artist for RHA. Although he is influenced by the stylistic techniques and fascination with the subconscious of the Surrealists, Padilla draws direct inspiration from his own experiences. His assemblages make use of the familiar, yet elusive forms and symbolism. Padilla creates unnatural happenings and expresses a sense of depersonalization and isolation.
