Alex Puz: Trichromacy: Alex Puz

Kensington, MD.

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Alex Puz: Trichromacy on view in Kensington, M.D., at 4228 Howard Ave from May 17th through July 26th. An opening reception will take place Saturday, May 17th from 6 to 8 pm. A full color catalogue with an essay by curator and art researcher Clare Patrick will be published to accompany this exhibition. 

Puz’s works unfold at the convergence of objectivity and subjectivity, posited in permanent oscillation at the moment in which color is distinguished through cognitive structures. Rather than deeming either physiological or psychological responses to color as the truth of visual experience, Puz dictates the mind’s untangling of his dense, folding patterns as a psychophysical process, thematizing the pathway of visual reception. The spectating of this exhibit transpires as a deeply human endeavor, re-orienting attention to what may lie—both cognitively and affectively—beyond an initial imprint upon the eye.

Puz’s paintings are constructed through the repetitive act of layering series of undulating lines, organized through calculated gradients of color. His distinctive adoption of color illuminates its quality of relationality: the canvas, reduced to its surface, garners significance through the extrinsic relations of color exchanged within its peripheries. By placing seemingly distinctive colors in dialogue with one another, he is allowing for his works to uphold a stark contrast, tension, or polarity, and, in return, prolongs the emotional state that emerges from them. Each layer implanted atop the painting reinscribes those that came before it, until the work begins to bear semblance to a variety of organic life forms: from the moving waves of the ocean to the convexes of a wasp nest, they project a sense of order that is juxtaposed with seemingly natural movement. It is impossible to navigate these intricacies without interruption; viewing is akin to a visual dismembering that gradually evokes clarity.

The exhibition title references trichromacy, a type of color vision that involves three independent channels simultaneously feeding signals from the eye to the brain. Puz’s paintings stagnate this very technique of the eye’s mediation, where the ambiguity of color serves to reveal an affective potential only attainable through extensive visual contemplation.