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www.casaravilla.com
Pintor natural de Montevideo, Uruguay.
Inicia su formación en 1954, tomando lecciones privadas en el taller de Miguel A. Pareja, en Uruguay. Posteriormente ingresará en la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de Montevideo, Uruguay, en la que se gradúa. En 1968 acudirá al Corcoran School of Art de Washington, Estados Unidos, y entre 1972 y 1973 formará parte de la Art League de Virginia del Norte, Estados Unidos.
Sus numerosas exposiciones y muestras dan comienzo en 1970, y se debaten principalmente entre su país, Uruguay y diversas ciudades de los Estados Unidos, destacando Washington, exponiendo reiteradas ocasiones en el World Bank, concretamente en 1975, 1977 y 1981.
Más recientemente, en el año 2001, participó en la Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Florencia, Italia, donde obtuvo notable éxito.
Su obra forma parte de numerosas colecciones privadas a lo largo del mundo.
La obra de Luis Casaravilla se ha movido por diferentes fases tales como la abstracción o el surrealismo, hasta la definitiva: el expresionismo abstracto, para advocar, en adelante, sus creaciones a esta corriente, cultivando también el género del retrato.
“Casaravilla desarrolla una labor de investigación y de búsqueda que abarca por igual sus estados interiores y procedimientos técnicos” afirma, acertadamente, Juan Perdomo Coll.
Lo cierto es que la obra de este artista manifiesta una cuidada labor intelectual presente en la manera de resolver la composición tanto como en el uso del color, que puede ser calculado y geométrico, o bien envolvente, suelto y dinámico. En cualquier caso sus composiciones son complejas y racionales, con una hábil superposición de planos que se debate entre orden y geometrismo. Con una pincelada suelta, que sabe domesticar el color, hermanándolo con la luz, da lugar a una obra homogénea en su estilo, y siempre en continuo avance.
Fuente: Enciclopedia Iberoamericana de Artistas Plásticos Contemporáneos de acuerdo a http://casaravilla.com/encyclopedia_entry.htm
Article published in New York's GALLERY&STUDIO magazine, Feb/Mar 2003.
Review of art exposition at Jadite Galleries, New York, November 2002.
Individual Show: "New Works".
Luis Casaravilla: Gesture Tempered by Geometry
Often the development of an artist's style must go through several phases before arriving at its most mature expression. Luis Casaravilla, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts, and now resides in Washington D.C., started with abstraction and surrealism. Subsequently, he worked his way through collage and periods of representation, before completing the circle of aesthetic growth with the abstract paintings for which he is known today, many of which are in private collections around the world.
A veteran of several successful solo shows in Uruguay and the U.S. who also participated in the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy, Casaravilla's most recent solo show, "New Works", was seen at Jadite Galleries, 413 West 50th Street, a venue which has distinguished itself by introducing some of the most interesting artists from Latin America to the New York art scene.
What immediately struck one about Casaravilla's exhibition was its stylistic diversity, kept skillfully in check by an overriding harmony. As well as any painter at work today, Casaravilla proves that a true style can be determined by a strong individual character, rather than by the selfconscious, superficial superimposition of habitual motifs to establish a recognizable stylistic signature. This recognition on the part of the painter allows him to move freely from gestural compositions, created with energetic, seemingly impetuous brush strokes, to more stringently organized geometric canvases, as the spirit moves him.
Because his formal explorations are governed by a singular sensibility, his wide-ranging approaches to form and color are invariably brought into harmony by his painterly authority. Even at his most spontaneous, Luis Casaravilla is an artist who always knows exactly what he is doing. Thus his untitled abstractions comprised of bold, serpentine strokes of color that project a sense of untrammeled energy work perfectly in concert with other paintings, such as Construction II, which are considerably more geometric.
While the latter canvas is essentially abstract, it alludes to urban architecture and its composition is created with overlapping rectangular forms. These forms stand in sharp contrast to the flowing, sensual, curvaceous shapes seen in many of Casaravilla's more recent acrylics on canvas, with their dynamically writhing compositions. Yet for all their contrasts with his more austerely composed works, these new paintings succeed so splendidly by virtue of Casaravilla's ability to temper their gestural freedom with an underlying sense of structure and depth.
In one untitled abstraction, variegated strokes of blue, green, and white are interwoven with a broad brush to create a composition so muscularly compressed that it seemingly threatens to explode the canvas from its stretcher bars (click here to view). By contrast, in another untitled gestural abstraction, vibrant red, blue, and yellow hues laid down in contrastingly loose strokes suggest a lyrical chromatic shower (click here to view). Yet another painting is composed with intricately braided, ribbon-like color areas that are at once rhythmic and precise in a manner that tempts one to risk redundancy and term them Neo-Futurist (click here to view).
Whatever one wishes to call the paintings of Luis Casaravilla, however, they are impressive for their synthesis of freedom and structure, sensuality and austerity. His recent exhibition at Jadite Galleries showed Casaravilla at the top of his form.
Maurice Taplinger
Source: http://casaravilla.com/review.htm
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