Juan Bernal: Pure and Simple

Juan Bernal: Pure and Simple presents paintings and photographs from several series by this artist and architect who originally hails from Colombia—The Light (paintings of light rays), Dew (paintings of water droplets), and Fragments (paintings of the geometry of leaves). Bernal looks deeply into nature’s elemental forms and sees broader life and a larger landscape. He follows the leaf in new color, young and green, until it bursts into the brilliant orange of life realized. In his works, Bernal perfectly balances the genres of landscape and still-life, urging us to step closer, pause, and enjoy the shimmering lushness of nature in the everyday.

To contrast these close-up views of nature, Bernal creates a new painting for this exhibition, The Great River, a six by nine foot panorama of a composed landscape along the banks of the Hudson River, inspired by the grandly-scaled compositions of nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Jasper Cropsey. These earlier painters often combined sketches from different locations to paint one idealized scene in the studio. Bernal, too, creates a Hudson River scene but “sketches” first, not with portable easel and paint, but with camera and computer. He shows how, piece by piece, from first photograph to final painting, a work comes together.