Lyle Carbajal
Arte y Vida Chicago is part of Chicago Artists Month, the thirteenth annual celebration of Chicago’s vibrant visual art community. In October, more than 200 exhibitions of emerging and established artists, openings, demonstrations, tours, open studios and neighborhood art walks take place at galleries, cultural centers and arts buildings throughout the city. Chicago Artists Month is organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
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There’s nothing quite as beautiful as the unintentional. For this reason I’ve attempted through the use of color, reference, placement, and most importantly, line, to capture, if just a fraction, of the naiveté I see in my daily surroundings. My bright colors and dark, brisk lines reflect moods of small children, brush-in-hand, being told to concentrate and stay within the lines, by those well intentioned grade school teachers who encouraged us all to produce masterpieces. Tucked into my own pictures are images associated with childhood: comics, monsters, machines, animals and faces. My interest in the face is evident in each painting, where the primary visages are wild-eyed and gripped with anger, terror, confusion or pain. Either way, the depictions of extreme emotive states delineate my paintings from those of a child. Both the innocent associations of youth and the horror of maturation are bluntly juxtaposed, and seek not so much to find unity in the passage of life, but to expose its division.
Childhood memories and my Latin American background helped me search for a primitive expression of the world. Just like Debuffet, Twombly and Appel before me, my pursuit of “Brut” has lead me in both tangible and psychological directions, which I presume will continue indefinitely.
Although I lack a formal education in painting, a degree in design taught me to see shapes, colors, typography and distinct references. Life’s landscape, on the other hand, taught me about Mexican masks and muralism, functional graphics, vandalism, Haitian flags, folk signage, randomness and urbanism, all which find their way into my work. It is through this extensive knowledge of both popular and primitive cultures that helps in the creation of my pictures.
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