David Pagel's lecture has been rescheduled for November 1st.
Jose Bellver, local painter and UNLV professor, will be speaking Thursday 27th @ 6pm. His work may be viewed on his website: josebellver.com. The following review of Jose's work was written by curator Diane Deming, of the Nevada Museum of Art:
"Originally from Madrid, Spain, artist Jose Bellver lives and works in the small city of Pahrump, Nevada, located on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Throughout his career, Bellver has worked with the concept of series, or bodies of work in which he explores particular ideas about color, texture and design. In the 80s, for example, Bellver created a group of Black Paintings, using tar as a medium to create a textured surface in which brush strokes functioned akin to calligraphy. He began to explore the process of painting as a way to free the picture from any sense of narrative or imagery.
The series of paintings featured in the Nevada Triennial represent Bellver’s most recent work. Emerging after a long period of recuperation following several personal tragedies, including a life-threatening car accident, the paintings express Bellver’s renewed joy and passion for color and the physical and emotional nature of painting.
All the paintings are untitled and focus on the exploration of a single color, even though several colors and paints may have gone into the underpainting. All of the paintings are large-scale, identical in size and created on wood surfaces. But the surfaces below the simplified foundations are build up through rich, expressionistic applications of pigments that he applies with a trowel. The results are paintings that are rich and vivid, deep and sensuous, challenging our notions about specific colors. Bellver’s yellows become golden and luminous with underpainting of copper and silver pigments. The surfaces take on the appearance of weathered wall surfaces or drawings, at times rubbed and worn and in other places almost linear and vibranting.
The context for Bellver’s recent paintings dates back to the late 1950s and 60s with the Minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhart. Throughout his long career, Bellver has explored numerous styles, ranging from the creation of smooth- surface designs and patterns based on specific objects and still life forms. To abstract paintings with heavy impasto and limited palettes. His most recent paintings look back to a significant period in American abstraction where the idea of working within defined limits were reified. The pictures explore the metaphysical aspect of applying paint to canvas, becoming one with the process of painting. Bellver nonetheless chooses palettes that counter the monochromatic aspect of Minimalism, instead gravitating toward searing colors, which he enhances with underpainting composed of metallic hues of gold, silver, platinum and bronze. In this respect, Bellver takes his work out of the contest of Minimalism and flirts with a kind of Neo-Expressionism and mark making distantly related to that of artist such as Cy Twombly or even Pat Steir.Jose Bellver was formally trained in Spain during the 1960’s, when he studied at the Ciculo de Bellas Artes, the Escuela de Artes y Oficios Artisticos and received his graduation from the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernado in Madrid. He came to the United States in the late 1960’s and initially taght art for the San Francisco Unified School District from 1969 to 1970. In 1972, Bellver received a second MFA from California State University, Sacramento. He moved to Nevada in 1980 and quickly established a reputation as a painter in Las Vegas.
Bellver’s paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibits not only in Las Vegas, but throughout the United States and South America. From 1980 to 1999 he was on the faculty of the Art Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with adjunct teaching at the Community College of Southern Nevada. Currently he is the adjunct painting professor at UNLV. Bellver has been recognized in numerous publications and in 1997 was awarded the Governor’s Art Award, the most pretigious award given to the artists in our state".
