German Tagle

German Tagle (b. Chile, 1976) is a painter who relishes the materials he works with. His paintings are explosive, lush, vital, and sublime. Rocio Aranda Alvarado (curator at El Museo del Barrio) writes, "each stroke contains a balance of admiration for both the opulence and the lethal power of nature."

In paintings both on fabric and on paper, Tagle's experimentation with media begins with the support. He has used a number of different fabrics, fromtoile to denim, or simply raw cotton, and has repurposed pages out of art history books or calendars portraying landscape scenes. These often unconventional supports become recipients of layer upon layer of acrylic paint impasto formed and shaped by gestural brushstrokes that take the eye from one plane to another in the picture space; clear gel mediums join this tactile swirl and create oozing transparencies in between which the artist might intervene with ink line drawing.

Tagle does not consider himself an abstract painter in the sense that his work is not entirely non-objective. His starting point is regularly the landscape and, in recent years, he has been inspired by specific figural motifs found in the toile fabrics he has worked on, which he has placed repetitiously within...