Candid Reflection by Kevin Umaña

Umaña’s work utilizes a mathematical approach to modernity, exploring the essential relationships between form, composition, and color. These concepts are then utilized in analyzing the concept of experience and perception in the form of time and memory. Subtly adjusting and reworking these connections, Umaña is able to highlight materiality, space and point of view. Inspired by architecture and urban design, Umaña’s paintings are constructed with everyday materials. Making use of functional elements, Umaña is able to achieve a dialogue between the tangible and conceptual. His canvases are built up with layers of gouache, acrylic, stucco, sand, marble dust, and fabric paste. From afar, the work appears clean, simple, reductive, but upon closer inspection, they’re raw, textural and gestural. Umaña relies heavily on painting as an object. The raw paint is applied laboriously through technical methodologies, from dry brushing into the canvas’s weave, to complex layering techniques: each application calls attention to the materiality of each individual component. In addition to the process, Umaña’s titles raise larger ideas at play in his work. Each title pays homage to a specific location the artist has experienced. The work seeks to minimize the superfluous details of experience to more core values and essentials. The most basic elements are then synthesized to their purest aesthetics and unique visual language in an attempt to personify the characteristics of structure and design. Through this process, Umaña is able to underline the specific memories, senses, and emotions of that place and time. Through Umaña’s distinct abstract vocabulary, his work is open to interpretation, leaving his viewers the unique ability to draw upon their own experiences and associations. Color, at its most basic form, is remarkable in its power to disrupt, emote, and shift perception. Umaña sees his paintings as implements of transformation, able to re-wire our modes of thinking and alter the way we see the world.