FOR 11/2

JUAN DOWNEY, HUGO BASTIDAS AT NOHRA HAIME GALLERY w/1 cut

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NEW YORK CITY — Nohra Haime Gallery presents the exhibitions “Juan Downey: Meditation Drawings” and “Hugo Bastidas: Bridges, Paths and Portals, Where Do We Go From Here?” Both are on view through December 1.

From June 1976 to August 1977, Downey lived with his family in the Amazon jungle. He spent nine months with the Yanomami Indians, one of the largest and most primitive tribes that still exist.

During his stay with the Yanomamis, Downey practiced daily meditation. Afterward, he would “draw” a meditation, one a day, in that semiconscious state between sleep and awakening. The 34 drawings in this exhibition are examples of this phase of his life.

Using pencil, colored pencils and graphite, the artist extracts the essence of life and its energy force. Even though small in scale, these drawings extend beyond the surface of the paper, entering viewers’ space and drawing them into a world of energy. Concentric clockwise or counterclockwise circles diffuse their energy.

Two of Downey’s videos, The Laughing Alligator and The Abandoned Shabono, , will be shown at the gallery Thursday, November 16, at 6:30 and 7:30 pm.

Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological The Laughing Alligator is a personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami of Venezuela, this work distills Downey’s search for his own cultural identity and heritage through the encounter between the Western family and the so-called “primitive” tribe.

Challenging the anthropological view of the Yanomami as violent cannibals, Downey focuses on the tribe’s myths, rituals and ceremonies, documenting funerary rites in which tribal members eat the pulverized ashes of their dead to ensure their immortality.

In 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale, Downey was posthumously awarded an honorable mention for Excellence in Art, Science and Technology for his video (About Cages) Plateau of Humankind, Chilean Pavilion, in Venice, Italy.

Downey was born in Santiago, Chile in 1940 and died in 1993. His work is in numerous museum collections worldwide.

In this new body of work, Hugo Bastidas returns to the theme of the path and the mark. As in his earlier works, these paintings portray places that exist in reality, and yet they also depict a place that exists in the subconscious, symbolic of everyday decisions and fears.

Bastidas’s technique of optical effects sets the stage for a visual and subconscious experience. His black and white style is the basis of the works’ mysticism.

As one examines his canvases it is difficult not to simply appreciate the works for the idea of the stroke and its innate personality. Each stroke represents a moment that has happened. Bastidas’s strokes and marks exemplify the notion of the path, that it has a beginning, a moment, and an end.

Bastidas is concerned with exploring the human condition and surroundings, whether it be an indigenous culture or an urban setting.

In “Into the Mystic,” there is only forward as life moves on. It is reminiscent of his past work “Split in the Road.” In “Flower Bridge,” he uses the reflection in the water as a way to creatively exemplify two different bridges that one can take through optical effects.

Another theme at the nucleus of Bastidas’s work is that of existentialism. “Oath to Armani,” the series’ most set-apart piece in comparison to the rest, makes clear that Bastidas is expressing something different than the questions of life, but rather ideals concerned with selfhood. Here Bastidas contrasts the billboard with a building, which is cropped, focusing attention directly on the Armani advertisement itself.

The gallery is at 41 East 57th Street. For information, 212-888-3550.