Andes
Elista Punto and Blok
Blok and Elisita Punto met at a music show in their hometown of Santiago, Chile where they ended up painting a mural together in an empty lot. Since then they’ve become fast friends, hanging out, traveling to the desert and collaborating on art.
Elisita Punto intricately cuts out colorful masking tape to create abstract collages on paper. Interweaving lines and shapes produce optical illusions that play with space and resonate as possible futuristic cityscapes, overhead maps, early video game graphics, and digital noise. They have a rhythmic quality that acts almost like visual music compositions, while the colors bring to mind the festiveness of a birthday party. Indigenous patterns from Andean culture provide an inspiration for these works that are able to reinvent themselves in the modern world and reveal our timeless obsession with repetition and shapes. The Andes mountains are present in her paintings on found wood as well, similarly filtered through her colorful geometric visions of space and landscape; a utopic candyland that one cant help but want to visit.
In his first US show, Blok will feature drawings and paintings created in Chile over the past 2 years. Long-limbed characters dressed in hot pink shirts and socks are caught in a dream like state; floating, bending over, or reaching for something in the distance. Piles of bodies, snakes, plants, and houses inside of pianos are a part of Blok’s surreal world. His murals are like discovering colorful little secrets worked into the scenery: bold fluid lines with muted and flat colors create figures that you want to hug and get to know and that stick with you long after you’ve come across one.
