Last week, Avant Gallery opened Conversations with a Stranger, the first solo exhibition of artist Felipe Echeverry, also known as LaSsO.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Avant Gallery
The exhibition by Felipe Echeverry is on view from November 8th through December 22nd, 2019 at Avant Gallery’s New York Hudson Yards location. A private reception was held on November 7th, prior to the opening.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Avant Gallery
Through textural ruminations on community and connection, the Cali, Colombia-born LaSsO draws from the solace of observation. Seats on a crowded subway car have the solemnity of church pews at Sunday mass. A bar full of people, each ensnared by their own devices, considers the performance of everyday, singular routines shared by hundreds. LaSsO finds harmony in a cacophonous scene. His oft-intuitive mark-making reflects on the vitality of circumstance, measured from the eyes of a steady hand and the viscerality of a calm observer. The diasporic experience is felt; the contents of a suitcase, stationary but for the tactile brushstrokes, evoke the migration of thousands of miles.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Avant Gallery
Warm mahogany hues and rich cerulean blues permeate the abstract. LaSsO’s figures are his idolos, regular people blessed with their own significant grace and power. In this way, he reimagines spiritual iconography with the tenets of art history and popular culture, deifying the everyday individual. In Palenquera, a web of linework and shapes depict apples, bananas and mangos with earthy charcoal and pastel, forming the traditional fruit merchants of the artist’s native Colombia. Lasso’s practice airs a dense grit of a life truly lived. Notes of Picasso, Murillo, Basquiat or Baselitz come to mind, but LaSsO’s untreated canvases each retain their own raw, wondrous luster, a circuitous tête-à-tête between subject, artist and viewer.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Avant Gallery
For more on Avant Gallery, visit www.avantgallery.com.
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