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Jordi Boldo at Museo de la Secretaria de Hacienda

Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Edward M. Gomez

Jordi Boldo was born in Barcelona in 1949 and, as a boy, emigrated to Mexico. Trained as an economist, with a background in book design and production, Boldo did not formally study painting or art history; he began making art in his 30s, passing through a period of bright, Mexican-flavored palettes and abstract compositions featuring subtle geometric forms before arriving at his mature, deeply expressive, style. His mixed-medium paintings on canvas, board or paper are characteristic of that style, with their thick, crusty textures achieved by, for example, scraping or incising the surfaces. Boldo's work boasts strong affinities to informalismo, the variety of Abstract Expressionism that flourished in his native Catalonia after World War II, as well as to North American abstraction in its most vigorous forms.

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Boldo always works in series. In recent years, he has created many paintings under the titles "Mapas" (Maps) and "Hallazgos" (Discoveries), abandoning the bright colors of his early years in favor of a basic palette of browns and other earth tones, or of muddy-milky whites accented with dashes of more intense hues. The works on view in this exhibition, titled "In-materico" (Immaterial), at a museum in Mexico City's downtown historic district, were open and airy. In paintings like Nuevo Hallazgo 1 (2007), Boldo builds up alternating layers of thin washes and broad dark strokes to create a light, multi-textured field in which a sprinkling of buglike forms float at random.

In Mapa XVI (2002), the artist sets a sprawling, white, vaguely calligraphic form against a background of hardy darks shot through with a spray of pink. Cien Hallazgos (2005) consists of 100 small, mixed-medium works on canvas or board (each about 8 inches square) hung on a wall in a long, horizontal grid. Each unit serves as a vivid document of the techniques Boldo employed to make it: collaging and overpainting scraps of fabric, printed matter or objects like tea bags; brushing on thick impasto; drawing with a freewheeling, delicate line.

Boldo, who has written extensively about his art, says he is more interested in the creative process than in its results, and in how his art-making processes "generate and establish their own rules." In fact, like the best free-form jazz, Boldo's art is a palpably exciting investigation of the techniques and structures that engender abstract form.--Edward M. Gomez

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Jordi Boldo at Museo de la Secretaria de Hacienda

Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Edward M. Gomez

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