This exhibition presents recent abstract works reflecting the artist’s decades-long experimentation with materials and his engagement with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Color Field painting, Process Art, and Concrete Art—while infusing these influences with his Mexican roots and understanding of Mesoamerican art, materials, and cosmovision.
Rojas first left his native Mexico with his family when he was six, and his frequent wandering since has shaped his universal visual language as well as his experimental approach to materials and art. The Zen emphasis on purity of form plays a significant role in his work and results in patterns and grids that involve color, geometry, and through repetition generate rhythms, harmonies, and vibrations.
Working fluidly between painting and sculpture, Rojas uses tactile materials—including wax, layers of paint, sandpaper, and crayon—to deconstruct materiality and discover new meanings. Rojas says, “I begin a piece with a feeling rather than an idea. It is in the act of making that the meaning is revealed.”
Jorge Rojas, Into the Light
Jorge Rojas, Quantum Grid
Material Meditations also features an installation entitled Corn Mandala: Belonging. For more than 10 years, much of Rojas’s sculptural and performance work has celebrated the spiritual significance of maize for Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. Corn Mandala: Belonging is the seventh in an ongoing series of ephemeral, site-specific installations where the artist uses colorful natural corn kernels to produce patterns and symbols deeply rooted in Mesoamerican, Native American, and in this case, Polynesian tradition. By creating a new design that brings together symbols from several cultures, Corn Mandala: Belonging honors Native and migrant cultures inhabiting and contributing to the richness of this region.
Corn Mandala: Belonging, by Jorge Rojas