Leonardo Pineda is a young Colombian artist whose vibrant color and vigorous rendering attract immediate attention. “Por Fuera,” from outside, or from abroad, aptly describes Pineda’s painterly interpretation of contemporary life in Bogota—which may strike US viewers as not so different from the North American urban landscape.

The increasing pace of urban life with its concomitant exciting (but sometimes overwhelming) rush of images has been one of the motive factors behind modern art. Picasso spoke of having to paint out the green in his system after walking in the woods, while others have described art as the pearl laboriously secreted around the irritating grain of sand. The welter of stimuli of modern life is thus ’processed’ through the various conceptual filters we call styles, from impressionism through expressionism, cubism, surrealism, abstraction, and so on. The heady flow of sights and sounds is psychologically integrated, yielding new artistic realities.

Avant-garde theory used to assert that stylistic change was historically mandated, each revolutionary change in consciousness superseding its predecessor before being eclipsed by its successor.. Nowadays, however, that determinist view (memorably satirized in a Saul Steinberg cartoon of a bearded beatnik army on the march) no longer prevails. Art history, like every other living tradition, engages in a dialogue with the living past, each generation making its contributions. Artists today, freed from historicist dogma, are free to choose from a number of approaches, or to combine them to form their own unique fusions.

Pineda’s work exemplifies contemporary eclecticism, combining elements of styles not normally considered esthetic bedfellows: the casual doodling and skewed perspectives of the untrained child or outsider artist; the everyday subject matter of Ashcan realism, cubism and Pop Art; the vigorous brushwork and ambiguous 2D/3D space of Abstract Expressionism; the use of photographic projection and silkscreen from photorealism and Pop, respectively; and the use of painted words (trafico, martini, botella, zoom, Metro, caminando sola) and arrows to form concrete visual/verbal poems; line and color, word and image come together to create new poetic entities. These visually rich mixed-media (acrylic, paint marker, oil pastel, collage) pieces are thematically and stylistically charged as well, hinting at influences as disparate as Warhol, Johns, Dubuffet, Twombly, and Basquiat.

Leonardo Pineda, Bicicleta, 2006, mixed media on canvas, 55 x 55 in.

What emerges from Pineda’s cityscapes, florals, and apotheoses of bicycles, cars, cocktail glasses and wine bottles —all iconic vehicles of transportation and emotional transport— is a naïve yet sophisticated celebration of modern life in all its dynamism and excitement: sensory overload as ecstasy and exaltation. Pineda’s cityscapes have the innocence of children’s visions, with simplified buildings and cars, and maplike aerial perspectives.

Urban life can be claustrophobic also, however, as art critic Natalia Vega has pointed out: “Pineda’s paintings present a narrative ambiguity …[between the] celebratory… [and the] disturbing.” (It is telling that artist, an urban stroller and connoisseurial observer, is also an aficionado of the outdoors and an avid bicyclist.) Pineda’s street-level paintings dissolve the unitary city into an abstraction of buzzing neon sign images, reflections in plate glass, and incomplete or repeated or backwards-reading messages which we interpret as satirical or witty internal monologue; space is intangible except as a brightly colored atmosphere proffering tantalizing objects of desire.

This love-hate relationship with modernity is neither specifically Colombian nor American, of course; as the world shrinks, with globalism spreading, for better or worse, a consumerist monoculture often at odds with local tradition and history, jumbling past, present and future, it is universal.

Leonardo Pineda: Por Fuera will be on view at Gallery 415 May 19th through June 30th, 2007.