Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present The Pastoral and the Celestial. The exhibit brings together Richard 'Ricky' Armendariz, Cecilia Biagini, Graciela Iturbide, Nicolas Leiva, and Cecilia Paredes in a celebration of painting, photography, and ceramics, inviting the viewer into a realm where the boundaries between the tangible and the imagined blur. A percentage of artwork sales will benefit the Arturo Infante Almeida UTSA Art Collection Endowment.

Working within the borders of geometry, Cecilia Biagini explores the properties and relations between abstraction and construction, appearance and disappearance, lines and surfaces, as well as form and structure.

Conjuring the ludic with pure geometry in space, my work at times refers and alludes to musical and rhythmic waves, pseudo-scientific models/diagrams and is always anchored in the purity of the medium itself.

(Cecilia Biagini)

Innovative in his use of ceramic and paint on unusual surfaces, Nicolás Leiva works with a vocabulary of pure fantasy and cosmic inspiration. Bright colors and primal designs are the signature result of this artist’s expressionistic technique. Embedded in Leiva’s collection of forms and surface designs is a symbolic language that contains the narrative of an ethereal realm, but underlying his tales of paradise is a very real physical practice that is social, as well. In his paintings, drawings, and vessels, dwellings shift shape from boats, and houses, to flying carriages in a flower-filled realm that seems to exist somewhere past the margins of a Mayan codex.

Few images of Graciela's are as austere as this wooden horse (probably an old billboard) seen against high-tension lines. It shares the sense of ambiguity and illusion of most of her work. In fact, Iturbide has almost forgotten the site itself, the purpose of the dummy, and the connection of the location. The title pays homage to Gunther Gerszo (1915-2000), one of the most important 'abstract' artists in the Americas, who greatly appreciated this photograph, maybe on account of the evocative power of its composition.

(Graciela Iturbide)