Susan Eley Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of The Colors of Jazz, Argentine artist Carlos Puyol’s first solo show at Susan Eley Fine Art. Puyol first exhibited with Sefa in the group exhibition Shape Shifting (2013), and subsequently at Art Miami Context the same year.

The Colors of Jazz features 14 paintings, all created in 2017, and reflecting Puyol’s unique marriage of abstract expressionist gesture with a Pop Art sensibility. Swaths of flat and muted browns, oranges, bright purple, baby blues and lime green, are crisscrossed and punctuated with all-over, tangled webs of paint, stripes and broad linear forms. The eye moves across the wild, colorful, abstract surfaces as the ear would listen to a symphony of contemporary sound. Puyol’s paintings surprise in their dynamic energy, as they run along the edge between chaos and control. “The artist puts a force field together in paint using lines, banners, forms and fields that all look for their own space on the canvas,” writes Dutch art critic Emile Hollman.

Puyol works from sketches before he turns to the large canvases. While he paints, he listens to jazz music. The music is not background noise, but acts as guide as he works; Puyol expresses the rhythms and cadence of his beloved jazz through shapes and colors on the canvas. “The artist lets in the jazz and starts coloring, cleaning, stripping blowing and erasing,” adds Hollman.

Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1966, Puyol was a serious musician as a child, playing the violincello and guitar; at the same time, he was a skilled draughtsman, able to draw with incredible precision and likeness. After earning a BFA from the Institute University of Fine Art, Buenos Aires (1995) he moved to Spain in 2002, where he received an MFA at the University of Barcelona (2005). He continues to live and work in Barcelona today. Puyol is represented by Susan Eley Fine Art, New York, PonteArte, Maastricht, the Netherlands and MDA Gallery, Helsingborg, Sweden. He has had group and solo shows at these galleries, in addition to in galleries in Spain, France and Puerto Rico.

I have always painted the same thing: a fragmented reality. In the past, I represented the fragments through painted cuts and interruptions. More recently, I have sewn canvasses together, joining pieces of different paintings, even photographs of my works from earlier periods. For me, the shards pieced together represent an alternative to the world view that reality is a univocal, coherent, meaningful system, and that time is neatly divided into a continuum of past, present and future. In my view, life is more disjointed and unfettered, time more fluid. I have tried to capture this fragmentation and this fluidity in my work.