steven cabral: Teach Me to Tango
Exhibition Dates: september 5 - 30, 2023
Reception: thursday, september 7, 5PM - 8pm
Closing Reception/artist’s talk: saturday, september 30, 4PM - 6pm
Finding Space #2, 2023
Finding Space #3, 2023
The Painting Center is pleased to present Teach Me to Tango, new paintings by Steven Cabral. Cabral begins each work with a problem he wants to solve. His skill as a painter is masterful, his intention is deeply personal. In his exhibition Teach Me to Tango, he presents a tug-of-war between precision and abandon through his on-going investigation of abstraction.
The artistic process itself becomes particularly poetic and resonant in an exhibition of new and recent works by Steven Cabral. In Teach Me to Tango, the artist merges two bodies of work together. Where he once sought the solace of calculated movements and precision bound by a contemplative and quiet approach in a recent body of work, there is a new urgency and abandon, a faster and more chaotic method of artmaking in a new body of work. Cabral leaned into this new art-making choreography, embracing the unpredictable and plunging into uncharted depths. The result is a rhythm of building and breaking patterns of movement. The artist creates a weaving narrative grappled with grief; an exploration of the in-between, that place where one looks-back-on-a-life with an awareness of the present lived in the form of anticipation.
Cabral has expanded his visual language expanding on the idea of the material metaphor – the collapse of subject and content into form and expression. Cabral shifts from dominating the material to waiting and listening for the rhythm before he makes his next mark. When a painting becomes too rigid or immaculate, he takes a bold risk by pouring and staining paint, inviting the chaos. Amidst the tumult, unexplored spaces and languages emerge. Elements, shapes, and colors interplay. The tension in Cabral’s palette imbues each canvas with an almost vibrating charge. This surrender into the process invites possibility and surprise. His infinite treatment of surface and pattern takes center stage using acrylic paint, Flashe, marker, crayon, fabric, and paper.
Steven Cabral is a Boston-based painter and has shown his work in several group exhibitions in the greater Boston and New York City areas. He is a member of the Vernon Street artists’ community in Somerville, Massachusetts. Steven holds a BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and an MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Somerville.
For more information on the artist, visit: stevenjcabral.com.
