Rosetta stone 2017

Mariojosé Ángeles’s “Rosetta Stone” is made with, I’m guessing, oils that have been coaxed across the canvas. The colors – blues, yellows, pinks, purples – are reminiscent of a bruise, an unresolved trauma surfacing on the skin. The texture is slick, and reflective like an early 2000s airbrushed car. Yet there’s a softness, too, an almost fleshy quality to the shapes that emerge from the paint. See how the colors bleed into one another. Ángeles doesn’t shy away from the mess of painting. In the top left corner, there are some dark flecks sitting on top of the yellow, like dirty pollen. It draws my eye in, makes me wonder about the artist’s hand, what kind of tools or gestures made those marks, like little islands in a sea of color. “Rosetta Stone”, like all good painting, is not about answers, but about the questions that arise when we allow ourselves to get lost in the act of looking. It reminds me a little of Helen Frankenthaler or Pat Steir, artists who explored the tension between control and accident.