VISTAS: Cholo Cardenas

There is a quality of wistful and tender quietude to dormant houses holding numerous memorabilia. Photographs of a family treading across various passages of time across different generations. Graduations, wedding photos of grandparents, parents and children across different grades of monochrome and color, painting a picture of lives lived spread across walls and tables. Pair that with curtains waving on a quiet afternoon, with nobody in sight save perhaps for the sound of a slight breeze. The suggestion of life.

There are no visible human beings in this body of Cholo’s work, but it evokes something deeply similar, that of relics of a felt and present witnessing. The body of work in Vistas makes and takes a frame of stillness from the sense of a bigger natural world at large that continues to be in motion. To look at the grass, waves, sky and shadow tones is to almost see them move and flicker and wave in a wind one can almost imagine, and cicadas one can almost hear. One can even imagine the same view or vista at a different time of day. Where there is a splash of water, one can feel as though they are on the boat themselves. Sometimes the paintings feel like an everlasting loop of a particular vignette of organic matter simply being.

Cholo skillfully captures a tranquil kinesis of nature with a very human hand and view. The work feels touched, held and given. There is warmth and there is coolness. There is light and there is shade. There is sensation. The life in these paintings isn’t quite still–there is movement, and once again, certainly–life. — Gabrielle “Gatch” Gatchalian