REVIEWS & COMMENTARY
ACEVEDO in Context: Analog media 1977-1987 • Digital media 1983-2020
Amy Ione, LEONARDO Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology
ACEVEDO in Context offers a striking introduction to the ground-breaking career of Victor Acevedo. The narrative, supplemented with color plates, helps the reader position his pioneering work. Four essays by Peter Frank, Charlotte Frost, Thomas Miller, and Michael J. Masucci further enhance our understanding of his art, as do quotations and notes by the artist himself. The book also includes transcriptions from previously unpublished writings and interviews with art historian Patric Prince, and scientist-crystallographer, Arthur L. Loeb. One particularly compelling aspect of the survey is how Acevedo developed his unique voice in conversation with other artists. These forays demonstrate Acevedo’s talent for incorporating different schools of art as he developed his unique style. The influences of M.C. Escher, Salvador Dali’s surrealism, and R. Buckminster Fuller stand out. Cubism and Futurism are also woven into his work from his earliest days. [Read more..]
Amy Ione is an artist, educator, international lecturer, and the Director of Berkeley-based Diatrope Institute. She has published many books and journal articles on her multidisciplinary research, including Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths (Rodopi, 2005).
Shana Nys Dambrot, Meet an Artist Monday, LA WEEKLY January 9, 2023
Victor Acevedo has been making digital art since the early 1980s, working with pre-everything software to create metaphysical, geometric, Cubism-inflected images and videos exploring the abstract forces behind the world as we perceive it. In Acevedo’s use of computer graphics and polyhedral metaphors, his voice is both personal and conceptual; the exciting permutations of this matrix have continued to evolve in step with cultural and technological advances. With influences from Picasso to Escher to Buckminster Fuller, Acevedo remixes images taken from ordinary experience and transmutes them through a layered digital language, making it explicit how increasingly intertwined these levels of reality already are. At the same time, that most specific and analog of adventures — a career survey monographic book.
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Art & Cake, and Artillery. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, and is a Co-Chair of ArtTable's SoCal Chapter, an award-winning member of the LA Press Club, and a recipient of the 2022 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize. She sits on the Board of Art Share-LA the Advisory Council of Building Bridges Art Exchange.
Renata Janiszewska & Elizabeth Herbert
Victor Acevedo himself and his book comprise a kind of performance work wherein he documents a relationship between his art and his experience. The book’s content is, in part, an archive of his manipulation of mathematical and geometrical systems. For the non-specialist they are bewildering in their complexity and interrelationships with one another.
The artist employs a succession of conceptual frameworks. Let’s look at the cover image - The Lacemaker. First, Acevedo is fascinated by Salvador Dali‘s own obsessive interest in the image which was first painted by Johannes Vermeer. Then he took a photograph of a friend in 1995. The appearance of his friend reminds him of The Lacemaker. Acevedo’s digital revision is a geometric network that floats over top of the photographic image. Now there is a new and alien order imposed upon the image. These two elements might initially appear as two irreconcilable visual ideas. What do they have to do with each other?
What aspect of Buckminster Fuller’s thought is at work here in the Lacemaker? Fuller’s goal was to find common ground between spatial, mathematical, and philosophical concepts. Acevedo’s Lacemaker is made in the spirit of Fuller’s drive to create unity out of diversity. The artist’s superimposition of that Fulleresque geometry contextualizes and amplifies the meaning and power of his own photograph.
In some ways the book is like a Gesamtkunstwerk (the totally integrated work of art) where the disparate parts become a visually and conceptually integrated whole. This book itself contains many images and is therefore a comprehensive guide to Acevedo's work. It is a textual and visual embodiment of his creative process, and in the full sense of the expression, is thus an Artist's Book.
Renata Janiszewska is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, animation, music, sculpture, installation and murals. She has exhibited her work internationally. Janiszewska has been making animations and pictures exclusively on electronic canvas using custom brushes of her own devising since 2010. She is an indexed artist of Techspressionism. Janszewska lives in Lion’s Head, Canada.
Elizabeth Herbert is a curator, historian and writer on art. She specializes in the art of South East Asia and the British Modernists. Herbert is currently writing a book on English painter William Glyde. She resides in Calgary, Canada.
Colin Goldberg
Digital Artist, Founder of the Techspressionist Group
https://techspressionism.com/
Acevedo in Context reveals the depth and complexity of the work of this pioneering artist. The intertwining of intellectual and technological exploration with personal narrative in Acevedo's work epitomizes what the term Techspressionism means to me. Victor has become a mainstay in our nascent Techspressionist community and this text has provided deep insight into his remarkable artistic journey from traditional media into the realm of the digital.
Bronx-born artist, curator and designer Colin Goldberg’s work explores the relationship between technology and personal expression. His studio practice bridges multiple disciplines, notably painting, printmaking, digital media, and social sculpture. Goldberg coined the term “Techspressionism” as the title for a solo exhibition in Southampton NY in 2011. It was first described as a movement in the 2014 WIRED article “If Picasso had a Macbook Pro” and was later elaborated upon in a 2015 interview on the PBS show Art Loft.