“Artist Statement - Lino Bernabe
Lino Bernabe explores time and the effect of the moving picture through the medium of painting. Applying concepts ordinarily pertaining to the field of cinema, Bernabe’s paintings animate under RGB-sequenced lights. He uses colored light to divide one image into three. The sequencing of light produces an unfolding narrative, enabling the two-dimensional paintings to expand into the dimension of time. The motion of figures perceived from the change in colored light produces a narrative that questions the sociological and physiological implications of each primary color. Each color provides a different history that is excavated and molded into stories revealing the underlying melody of the universe. Filtered through the artist’s personal encounters, these symbolic narratives are transformed, twisted and imbued with his unfettered imagination.
Bernabe’s site-specific installations are designed to be displayed in rooms flooded with successive blue, green and red light, immersing the viewer in a four-dimensional narrative. His innovative technique applies the principles of light diffraction to painting using monochromatic color filtration to strip colors of their hue and filter them into value relationships. The works are not made with special fluorescent paint, rather a process that involves methodical tuning of regular paint allowing it to absorb or reflect equal portions of primary light.
A Cuban-American from Miami, FL, Bernabe studied at New World School of the Arts and The Cooper Union, and maintains a full-time studio practice in NY. He has been represented by The Chimney Gallery in Brooklyn NY.
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The Palette:
Imagine if one were to mix a perfect color wheel. Let’s say, hypothetically, that each color shared a ratio of white:170 to black:140 on an RGB: 0-255 color scale, where say green would be R:140, G:170, B:140 and it’s complement magenta would be R170, G140, B170. Each primary color (red, green and blue) and secondary color (cyan, magenta and yellow) would have to share this same ratio in order to be relatively perfect to each other.
The Process:
It is a systematic use of physics and modern color theory that reconsiders the outdated classical color theory model and palette. As such, I have developed a process I call “Monochromatic Morphology” which uses the monochromatic or mono frequency nature of red, green and blue as a filtration device that removes the relativity of color. Without color relativity, the following monochromatic images can be considered colorless and in the same vein as a black and white image. So, in a way, my physical process is not about color. Rather, it uses color as a mechanical device to break apart the color spectrum into a triptych like succession of three black and white like images that prompts an ideal structure for the telling of a story. As systematic as this use of color is, there is a void left because I have removed the relativity of color. Therefore, I find it crucial that each piece and series questions the more figurative, symbolic, and poetic notions of color when drawing out the story so that in fact, that each piece is about a specific color.
The Story:
It came out of my work as a result of the process being applied. A more figurative exploration of narrative besieged me, despite my pre-existing relationship to narrative painting and cinema. I’m content to be a figurative painter for now, as time and time again, the four mechanical limbs and an eight pound head adjoined a stuffed sack of torso coined the human figure have been bent, shaped, altered and alluded to in as many different ways, as there are bodies present on the Earth. It is in this manipulation of the human figure that I have come to enjoy the prompt of the figurative painting. Taking into account the context of images in succession, figurative painting expands into the narrative dimension of time.
The Narrative:
Whether it be ambiguous or explicit, it is a tool for me to explore the reaches of the human story and expand my relationship with humanity at large—to find a kindred bond with cultures by looking through the filter of the human race without placing any culture, ethnography or belief systems above another. I have forgone the notion of cultures being considered foreign or belonging to a restricted source for artistic interaction. It is about the stories and how one can build a relationship through the total immersion and integration with the understanding of tales that stand to be preserved and reanimated by retelling them in new light. It Is hard to explain the pleasure of digging deep down the rabbit holes of myths and folklore from bygone times. It goes beyond just re-telling of tales from long ago; the stories infect me as a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where I start seeing how they parallel with my own contemporaries’ oneiric concoctions—to begin to engage and be consumed by stories as if playing in a collaborative improvisational session with the universal narratives of seemingly divergent tales told anachronistically within the paints plane, knitting them together to produce a union even among disparate kinds of knowledge to create new meanings. To this degree, the sea of metaphors pertaining to each of my paintings is more than meets the mind; as such, I’m happy with the statement, “this is a painting about blue”.