Anthony Goicolea is a Cuban-American artist, born 1971, known for his intermingled and manipulated human and natural environments. His Cuban background has served as an inspiration for portraits and landscapes in a wide variety of styles and media. His works exhibit a persistent purity of form and color, with many of his paintings, photographs, and installations featuring a geometric aesthetic and the same unnervingly muted color palette.
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| Low Tide (2006) |
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| Monument (2011) |
To me, his digitally manipulated landscapes exist both in a timeless state and on the verge of collapse, simultaneously. It is as if scenes like Low Tide and Monument (above) have been there forever, yet can’t hold together much longer. Goicolea’s biography describes them as “reflect[ing] an anonymous and increasingly tenuous human presence. In these works, primitive lean-tos and crudely constructed shanties coexist in an uneasy union with the technological vestiges of an industrialized society.” Goicolea uses these scenes to evoke isolation and displacement - I would suggest autobiographically.
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| Scroll (2014) |
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| Artificial Support System I, II, & III (n.d.) |
His strong aesthetic carries over to his installation work (examples above). As before, I find these pieces to have an almost architectural sense of geometry and linearity. His works are often imposing, cold, and exactingly rendered, and yet his themes - identity, culture, alienation - deal with topics at a definitively human level. That over the years he has been able to potently and consistently merge the two seems, in hindsight, the prerequisite to his international success.
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