Eamon Ore-Giron: The Symmetry of Tears

Gallery Exhibition at 48 Walker St | 1 May - 5 June 2021

  • In this exhibition, Eamon Ore-Giron presents new paintings from his ongoing Infinite Regress series, in which geometric shapes shift in and out of graphic fields of gold. The composite forms in Ore-Giron's paintings recall religious iconography, sacred landscapes, and celestial bodies subject to cyclical passages of time. Inserting pictorial and rhythmic structures from the Global South into an expanded history of transnational abstraction, Ore-Giron’s works embody what curator Marcela Guerrero refers to as “the sound and color of mestizo synesthesia.”

  • Within his Infinite Regress series, Ore-Giron’s totemic visual language is subject to an ongoing process of reformulation. In philosophy, infinite...

    EAMON ORE-GIRON, INFINITE REGRESS CXLIX, 2021

    SOLD

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    Within his Infinite Regress series, Ore-Giron’s totemic visual language is subject to an ongoing process of reformulation. In philosophy, infinite regress is a sequence of reasoning which never ends, a paradox of limitless regeneration that disproves the concept of fixed knowledge—in connecting one element to another, a third one is generated and so on, endlessly. The paintings in this series are each a variation on the one that came before, suggesting a trajectory of future iterations. Their chromatic planes play on spatial recession and optical perception as they trace an infinite path forward.

  • Ore-Giron’s paintings destabilize aesthetic hierarchies, drawing from a range of sources—such as the stylized geometry of Incan jewelry, Brazilian Neo-Concretism,...

    EAMON ORE-GIRON, INFINITE REGRESS CXLVII, 2020

    SOLD

    CLICK IMAGE FOR DETAILS

    Ore-Giron’s paintings destabilize aesthetic hierarchies, drawing from a range of sources—such as the stylized geometry of Incan jewelry, Brazilian Neo-Concretism, Italian Futurism, and the spatial arrangements of Russian Suprematism—that reflect diverse systems of knowledge and ways of being. Operating within these points of intersection allows Ore-Giron to examine his own varied cultural inheritances. He asks, “What are my inherited forms? What is my chromatic lineage? I am always confronted with the question of where my agency begins, and what has been there all along, waiting to be revealed.”

  • The Symmetry of Tears takes its name from the broken teardrop motif that appears in the paintings in the exhibition....

    The Symmetry of Tears takes its name from the broken teardrop motif that appears in the paintings in the exhibition. Inspired by an ancient Andean stone carving in Quillarumiyoc—an Incan temple dedicated to the moon in the Cuzco region of Peru—this form initially appeared on the periphery of Ore-Giron’s Infinite Regress paintings. It has become increasingly central to these works as the series has developed over the past five years. The artist originally encountered this pre-Columbian tectonic structure in Cesar Paternosto’s influential 1996 treatise The Stone and the Thread, which delineates the Andean origins of abstraction, and a history of this visual language outside of the dominant narrative of a European context.

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  • About the Artist

    Eamon Ore-Giron (b. 1973) grew up in Tucson, Arizona and has spent significant time in Peru, where his father was from, and Mexico. His travels, personal biography, and formal education as a fine artist—he received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles—have shaped his interest in exploring cultural hybridity and his formal vocabulary, which references artistic traditions and movements that span geographies and time. His work has been featured in shows that include SOFT POWER at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Soul Mining at the ASU Museum of Art, Arizona State University, Tempe (2017); Something Else, the OFF Biennale Cairo (2015); and the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at LAXART, Los Angeles (2015); the 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica (2012); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2005), among others. His work as part of the collaborative duo LOS JAICHACKERS has been shown at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2013) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008), and in Prospect.3, New Orleans (2014).

     

    Ore-Giron has been selected to realize major public commissions for subway stations in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, respectively. His work is in the permanent collections of of the United States Consulate General, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, curated by U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

     

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  • ¹Photograph of pre-Columbian tectonic structure found in Paternosto, César, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, University of Texas Press, 1996, p. 92.