Stuides of the Figure, 14 Hay Hill (2025)
“Carlos Bellido’s new body of work, Studies of the Figure, is direct in nature, yet free-form in impact. The palette, calculated from primaries, cuts through posed or still-life figures, imbuing gestures and affectations with a low hum of potential.
Desire, or something like it, slips between subjects, bringing the crease of a garment or, say, the contortion of a limb into sharp focus. Viewers are invited to cruise the forms, piecing together unfixed narratives that live on serendipity and chance.
In lieu of the abstract or inaccessible, the impasto technique and dreamlike scenes unfurl on first glance, albeit tied to one concise plane. The minutiae of encounters, gaze direction, the cleft before a woody buttock, or a bruised shadow along shorts conspire as part of a more blatant choreography.
One gets the impression these figures are friends or indeed mined from personal memories. Perhaps true, it doesn’t really matter. That sense of happenstance is the kernel in Bellido’s visual testimony and the very reason the works carry a meandering, pottered life-force. Not so much urgent as they are charged, each serves as an episode in a story read staccato, primed to come alive in a flicker or simply resume languor.
Peaks and troughs file into place, only to rearrange when more details re-determine the sequence. Each stroke arrives as if pre-ordained, but actually, it’s visual slippage.”
– Words by Joe Bobowicz