Falling... Painting

Visual art suffers in the public sphere from fleeting assumptions that great works are created in unadulterated, spontaneous 'bursts.' Notions of 'constructing' the artwork or illuminating the process of its creation are often dismissed as practices of an artist less 'inspired'. New York-based visual artist Joaquin Carter's practice is a glimmering antidote to this fallacy. While he revels in the unpredictable and the unplanned, Carter brings over three decades of experience as a practicing architect to the field of painting. His objects behave as potentially inhabitable environments and uncontrolled imaginative arenas. Carter highlights the 'procession and ritual' inherent in the architectural body; works that hypothesize the existence of an object that may be displayed as an aesthetic exercise and may also be simultaneously explored from within. His paintings are, effectively, testing grounds for new forms of experience challenging the viewer's approach to a structure serving the purposes of shelter, entertainment and discovery. Joaquin Carter was born in Sonora, México in 1964. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Arizona in 1988. Further studies included a six-month residency in Mexico City in a joint program of the University of Arizona with the Universidad La Salle (Mexico City). After relocating to New York in 1988, he began his architectural career under the mentorship of Emilio Ambasz. Notable projects in which Carter fulfilled alternating roles as an illustrator, Design Team member and Project Director include Casa Canales (Monterrey, México), the Centre Georges Pompidou Dining Terrace (Paris), the Sanda Cultural Center and Athletic Facility (Sanda, Japan) and the Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall (Fukuoka, Japan). Since 1996, Carter has been a full-time practicing visual artist, channeling an innate sense of functionality-acting-as-form into his paintings. Carter lives and works in New York.