Hueman: A Palette of Light and Shadow
Hueman is acclaimed for her sublime color sense, a palette that is somehow both saturated and diaphanous, and her inimitable style of merging expressive abstraction with elements of rarefied portraiture. But just as imperative for the painter, whether out on a wall or at the easel in the studio, is an intimate interest in painting’s qualities of surface, texture and the movement of light across, and through, an image.
In her new works for “Veiled Intent” Hueman deftly and innovatively explores how transparency and opacity operate in animating a composition’s surface. In mixed media paintings made using acrylic and spray paint on stretched sheer organza, Hueman more fully embraces the tumultuous, emotional, evocative potential of abstraction, sublimating her figures and faces within that volatile chromatic universe. “In this series,” she says, “humans are merely shadows or ghosts,” whose burning energy has left an imprint on the material world they’ve left behind.
There are echoes of the Catholic devotional art which Hueman experienced growing up -- expressed as aesthetic influences from Renaissance textiles and drapery to the bright flourishes of illuminated manuscripts, as well as in a more general motif of spiritual experience. In this new evolution of her style, she is equally inspired by more conceptual contemporary art historical traditions of California Minimalism and Light and Space artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell -- artists using innovative materiality in their explorations of pure color and ambient light.
The images change as you move around and across them, and there’s a further quasi-illusion of dimensional space, the generation of an expanded picture plane, because the light refracts behind the organza and off the wall, activating the actual architecture and creating a kind of analog lightbox effect. Hueman channels a bit of physics in these aspects, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the conceptualization of Spacetime as the fabric of the universe, susceptible to bursts of energetic distortion.
Because of the sheer surface of the organza material Hueman is working with, some parts of the paintings are opaque, while some remain transparent. Augmented by the vibrations of oppositional gradients in the color schemes, different places in each image engage the light differently. This affects the image itself, highlighting its abstract or figurative elements, rendering its aspects seemingly ephemeral, imparting the illusion of disappearance and emergence. In this way, these assertive yet delicate works both portray and in themselves embody a powerful metaphor for the ephemeral nature of existence itself.
-Shana Nys Dambrot Los Angeles, 2018
Mirus Gallery Denver is pleased to present the solo exhibition of HUEMAN. The exhibition opens Saturday September 8th, 7-10pm and runs through September 29th, 2018. VIP and Press is open Saturday September 8th, 5:30-7pm. Exhibition is free and open to the public.
