Contributed by Michael Brennan / Pierre Obando presents ten paintings, made between 2021 and 2025, in “Some Kind…,” his first exhibition at the Bushwick salon Starr Suites. While his imagery is for the most part recognizably organic, it is not easily decipherable. For example, he often uses the imprint or silhouette, which suggest things like palm fronds. They’re never exactly literal, though. As in, say, Matisse’s work, they are not necessarily derived from something specific or real. Obando’s abstraction is both allusive and elusive, as the show’s cryptic title suggests. This is a virtue.
Henri Matisse’s Monstera Deliciosa plant and his cut-out La Gerbe from 1953
Obando also shares with the School of Paris a sense of intimacy, warmly reinforced by the chamber-like quality of Starr Suites’ space. The work invites face-to-face engagement. This isn’t just because the paintings are generally small, for the larger ones remain equally warm. A key factor here is that the scale of Obando’s mark does not vary. He often paints within sub-quadrants – that is, in vignettes or windows within windows.
Depicting paintings within paintings is a common strategy. Matisse, among others, made frequent and celebrated use of it. In addition, Obando often holds viewers’ attention by placing the minute details of an event within his sub-quadrants.
Obando also shares with the School of Paris an indoor/outdoor duality. His paintings feel comfortably interior, but many of his sub-quadrants suggest whole landscapes, his forms mountains. Despite this suggestion of mass, the opposition between heavy and light is at play, too. Obando demonstrates the brisk paint handling and light lyricism of an artist like Raoul Dufy.
A more contemporary quality of Obando’s work is his engagement with counterfeit painting as a foil. Some segments of Obando’s work appear, unexpectedly, to be imprinted. The acrylic transfer technique he uses – whereby a non-absorbent sheet is placed atop wet brushwork – achieves visual effects similar to those of conventional printmaking techniques. The bafflement he implies, in post-modern limbo, is intriguing. Obando goes so far as to paint a dot matrix, creating a pseudo-halftone. Am I looking at a painting or a print? Because his work cannot be so quickly decoded, it’s not easily exhausted. Obando’s work is full of optical reversals as well, as areas alternately read positively and negatively.
Obando’s painting is sophisticated and vexing in a way that keeps you on your toes. It’s not entirely School of Paris, not exactly Hand-Painted Pop, and not completely Organic Abstraction. Instead, it’s a potent hybrid, enduring because it’s defiantly uncategorizable.
“Pierre Obando: Some Kind…”, Starr Suites, 281 Starr Street, Room 1R, Brooklyn, NY. Through May 18, 2025.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
Thanks for the brilliant review that offers a genuine observation from both a technical perspective and mere appreciation.