The Pabellón de las Bellas Artes and the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina are pleased to present for the first time the solo exhibition of the American artist Stevens Vaughn. With this exhibition the artist presents a series of works produced especially for this occasion under the title of “Como tinte que fluye”, curated by Massimo Scaringella and Cecilia Cavanagh and promoted by the US Embassy in Argentina and Hafnia Foundation.

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El silencio estaba lleno de estremecimientos, de roces, de murmullos de agua

Marguerite Yourcenar

“A painting is not a picture of an experience, it is an experience.” We could draw on this thought by Mark Rothko to describe Stevens Vaughn's work, which conveys the meaning of a visual essentiality, only apparently confusing, but structurally associated with an ironic and colorful view, expressing with its irrepressible sign a misleading gestural line, guided by a manual drive that is full of emotional and cultural expressionism that belongs in a sound reality. 

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The structure or, better still, the ‘ritualism’ of each work is composed as the expression of a non-verbal thought, transformed into an articulated structure based on the revelation of reality, where a stylistic exercise capable of turning desire into the irony of creativity joins a deferred dilation of time and space. Patches, rapid straining and chromatic hauteurs contain the definition of space, contending against nature and poetry for the search of formal solutions for their work, which end up in a disturbing use of such a primary element as water.

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In making art, Stevens Vaughn uses the dripping technique, which does not imply throwing color in a casual way. On the contrary, it means, based on an experienced search, distributing each drop of pigment following a naturally relative order where the unsteadiness of the free-flowing spout can give rise to different figures: it can break into small drops, it can splash according to the impact on the surface but always in a balanced manner or, as in some of his latest works, the folds of the paper may determine the color surface. Whatever the case may be, he never surrenders anything to style or to the viewer’s expectations, but only to the unyielding and patient journey of color, often diluted with water, hence becoming quicker, on the spotless sheets of his favorite paper, expressing a search for something that is, that exists. Often there is not even a story to be described, but the interior of the image is reached straightaway, coupling technique with the expressive demand of vision. 

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Stevens Vaughn with these works wants to convince that the exciting and provocative idea of making art, is to enterb into an anarchic absence of structure. But amazingly, these works, full of light and color, refer to a concrete vision of the world of today, in which the artist is well aware of the different cultural intersections encountered during his experience as an artist.

Cecilia Cavanagh

Massimo Scaringella 

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