Literature

Antonio Murado has created two editions with Durham Press: Diptych and Ocho láminas, a portfolio of eight screenprints. Murado often paints with gestural marks, abstracting to encourage a nonrepresentational interpretation of his work. As he explains, “We have this tendency to read things, to read everything into things we understand.” For Murado, it is important to be able to distance ourselves from associations of the tangible world. Like his larger practice, these prints explore this abstraction through themes of nature. In Diptych, washes of color build to create an atmosphere reminiscent of a cloud or wave though the image remains abstract in its hazy, indistinct form, much like in color field painting. Ocho láminas similarly evokes, but abstracts, nature – petal-like shapes meet, looping curves wind like vines, and stripes of emerald become blades of grass. While at first somewhat recognizable, these winding lines appear like magnifications of the natural elements we perceive them as, interrupinting our interpretation of anything familiar. Both Diptych and Ocho láminas combat our comfort zone of the known, pushing us to into a new abstract atmosphere.