who is

Gustavo is a Venezuelan-born visual artist, based in Vienna since 1991.
He describes himself as allergic to diplomas, despite having studied at the Federico Brandt Art Institute in Caracas and later at the School of Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
In 2012, he completed a carpentry apprenticeship, discovering that precision becomes more convincing once it involves splinters.
After more than three decades in Vienna, his work continues to operate between Central European order and Venezuelan and South American roots—both present, neither fully in control…

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the inevitable comes along…

The diasporic background of the artist has undoubtedly a great impact on his searching for the geometrical forms, which come to him as a part of the universal language. At the same time, he is aware of their particularity concerning different cultural backgrounds and sensibilities. He focuses his attention on the gaps and niches, on the things, that remain unsaid, on the pause or breathing in in-between the composition. Such structural experiences are in general common for everyone.

text extract © Miroslava Urbanová 2018

Living since childhood with Geometrism in art, the artist explores geometric combinations in recycled wooden works, assemblages that recall the graphic structures of his masters from the Stijl movement, the embryo of Neoplasticism and the Bauhaus School. It is not by chance that in his series of monochrome drawings we see a work with direct references to Mondrian’s grid compositions, the constructivist matrix has always guided Gustavo’s work. The support has changed, but the body of the work has not disappeared. Monochrome drawings, in which the artist shows us total freedom with the line, with space. In these flat sculptural forms, their context, their palpable physicality and function operate as a permanent reminder of the body – which confirms in many ways the artist’s presence in its evident absence.

Text extract © Luiz Martins 2018

Heritage

When one writes and reflects about, Latin American geometric art, always comes to mind the heritage of artists like Jesus Soto, Torres Garcia, Hélio Oiticica, Cruz-Diez and many others. Concrete art, for us Latin American artists, is not only a reference of aesthetics inherited from the Russian constructivists, it is a reflection on life, on the senses and concepts such as inside and outside, emptiness and fullness.

In the works by the artist Gustavo Mendez-Liska is a great influence of his country’s art can be felt, even though he gained wings so long ago, like several artists of his generation. In these 30 years in Austria, Gustavo has been developing his ideas without losing sight of his origins. I have followed the development of his work since his wood reliefs, when he draws not with pencil and paper but with machine and wood – transmitting with great Strength the Western way of thinking, acting and transforming.

Living since childhood with Geometrism in art, the artist explores geometric combinations in recycled wooden works, assemblages that recall the graphic structures of his masters from the Stijl movement, the embryo of Neoplasticism and the Bauhaus School. It is not by chance that in this series of monochrome drawings we see a work with direct references to Mondrian’s grid compositions, the constructivist matrix has always guided Gustavo’s work. The support has changed, but the body of the work has not disappeared. Monochrome drawings, in which the artist shows us total freedom with the line, with space. In these flat sculptural forms, their context, their palpable physicality and function operate as a permanent reminder of the body – which confirms in many ways the artist’s presence in its evident absence.

Gustavo approaches his current understanding of the body of his work by dematerialising it, something rare to see in an artist who transits from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. Materiality, due to its interchange ability, becomes secondary, reinforcing the artist’s perception of society, or of this society – so different from his habitat and which, partly through stubbornness and partly through gratitude and persistence has become a reference. In this project Gustavo seeks the evident primacy of a heritage that appears here levelled with other elements, through compositional strategies, inversions and repetitions that suggest an interchangeable identity.

I would like to end by underlining the cultural and social contemporaneity present in this set of works by Gustavo Mendez-Liska. His works reflect his personal and collective condition, he question the different, the other, the limits of his relations with this society, rethinking at the same time the concept of limit, returning to the root of the word Heritage, as something concrete that influences, transforms and strengthens. From an immigrant’s point of view, heritage particularises and enriches, characterises the parties and enables a rich dialogue, open and in solidarity.

Text © Luiz Martins 2018

The Line Through the Layers

My artistic practice emerges from a continuous investigation into space, structure, matter, memory and transformation. Working across painting, drawing and sculpture, I explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between what is constructed on the surface and what exists beneath it.

At the centre of my work is a persistent question: how can something fragmented become whole without losing the traces of its fragmentation?

I often think of my practice as a process of layering. Each work is formed through the accumulation, displacement, interruption or superposition of elements. A line may continue from one surface into another. A structure may conceal an interior that only becomes visible when it is opened. A material may carry the memory of another material, another place, another time.

The work therefore does not exist only in the final image or object. It exists in the relationship between its parts.

I imagine this relationship through the image of several transparent planes of glass. On each plane, a fragment of a thick line is painted. Individually, each fragment appears incomplete. Only when the planes are superimposed does the line become continuous.

For me, this image describes something essential about artistic practice, but also about life itself. We move through different layers of experience, geographies, languages, cultures and identities. Each layer seems to belong to a particular moment, yet beneath their apparent separation there may be a line that connects them all.

My own trajectory has been shaped by movement between worlds. Born in Venezuela and living in Vienna since 1991, I have developed my artistic language within the tension between different cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Migration, distance and displacement are not merely biographical circumstances; they have become part of the way I perceive space and construct meaning.

Perhaps for this reason, space has always been more than a background in my work. It is a material, a condition and a field of experience.

My engagement with geometry emerged early and has remained a fundamental thread throughout my development. Geometry offers me a language of order, but never of absolute certainty. A grid can organise space while simultaneously revealing its instability. A line can divide, connect, orient or interrupt. A structure can appear rigid while containing the possibility of transformation.

I am interested in this tension between order and disruption.

The geometric element in my work is therefore not simply a formal vocabulary. It is a way of thinking.

I approach the surface as a space in which relationships are constructed. Natural pigments, linen, wood, paper and other materials become participants in this process. Their physical qualities, histories and imperfections remain present. I am interested in allowing the material to resist complete control, so that the work emerges through a negotiation between intention and contingency.

My experience with wood and carpentry has also influenced my understanding of artistic construction. Building is not only a technical act. To build is to establish relationships between weight, balance, tension, support and space. It is to create a structure that can contain something, but also to recognise the moment when that structure must be opened.

This idea is central to my sculptural practice.

I return to the image of the cocoon: a structure that encloses a process of transformation. The cocoon protects, but it also conceals. At a certain point, however, the interior must become visible.

In one of my recurring mental images, I construct a wooden structure that gradually takes the form of a cocoon. I then cut it in half, exposing its centre.

The gesture is simultaneously constructive and destructive.

The structure is built in order to be opened.

The cut does not destroy the work; it reveals what was already contained within it.

This image has become, for me, a metaphor for artistic practice itself.

Perhaps the task of the artist is not always to invent something that did not previously exist, but to reveal what has been present but invisible. To construct a form capable of exposing its own interior. To bring hidden relationships to the surface.

In this sense, my work moves between two complementary gestures: superimposing and cutting, connecting and separating, constructing and revealing.

One gesture brings fragments together until a continuity appears.

The other penetrates a structure until its centre becomes visible.

Both are ways of approaching wholeness.

This search for wholeness is not a search for perfection. On the contrary, I am interested in the incomplete, the provisional and the unstable. The fragment is not a failure of the whole. It is one of the conditions through which the whole becomes perceptible.

My work therefore develops through a continuous movement between parts and totality, surface and depth, structure and transformation.

Painting, drawing and sculpture are not separate territories for me. They are different ways of approaching the same fundamental questions. A drawing can become spatial. A painting can suggest architecture. A sculptural structure can function as a drawing in space. A line can become a boundary, a trajectory, a cut or a connection.

The boundaries between disciplines remain deliberately open.
This openness also extends to my collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, in which visual art enters into dialogue with music, performance, architecture and other forms of spatial and temporal experience. I am interested in what happens when a work ceases to be an isolated object and becomes part of a larger field of relations.

My artistic development has therefore not followed a linear path. It has unfolded through accumulation, return and transformation. Ideas reappear in different forms. Materials migrate from one body of work to another. Earlier questions return at another scale, changed by time and experience.

I understand this process as a kind of continuous excavation.

Each new work removes or rearranges another layer.

Each layer carries traces of the previous ones.

And somewhere between them, the line continues.

Today, I see my practice as an ongoing attempt to make this line visible: the invisible continuity connecting apparently separate experiences, materials and forms.

The line that crosses the layers.

The structure that contains the centre.

The fragment that reveals the whole.

The surface that opens toward depth.

Ultimately, my work is concerned with the possibility of transformation: how matter can become space, how space can become memory, how memory can become form, and how form can reveal something that was there all along.

The work begins with construction.

But it does not end there.

It begins to speak when the structure opens.

HOW