In Sergio Gonzales-Tornero's "Sioux Pictograph," white symbols tell a rough story on a bright red ground.
He has covered a gallery wall with a playful mural in which ovoids and parts of circles disport in bright colors on a bright blue ground.
A particularly lively one is "Mecoxx," in which a bright blue ground gleams with orange and aqua-green brushings that suggest the surface of water.
"6 and 1/2 Lemons" places carcasses of half-lemons on a bright yellow ground, their outlines sketched in brush-drawn black, their messy cut faces exuding green splotches.
Klee's "Junger Mann am Vorabend" (1933), an eloquently Expressionist portrait in green against a bright blue ground, has an intensity of expression matching that of a magnificently brooding carved portrait mask from the Tsimshian Indian culture of the Northwest Coast.
He has covered one wall of the gallery with a playful mural in which ovoids and parts of circles in red, orange, pale blue, yellow and green, each outlined in white or yellow, disport on a bright blue ground.
Although the works are abstract, they sometimes make references to nature, as in "Mecoxx," a bright blue ground that gleams with orange and aqua-green brushings that suggest the surface of water.
The 10 paintings here, all from the mid-to-late 1960's, are distilled to these bare essentials, ranging from the simplest, an all-white canvas with a slim, slightly bent red streak down the center (reminiscent of a Barnett Newman zip), to the most complex, a bright blue ground overlaid by three multicolored curving lines, asymmetrically confined by thicker black bands on both sides of the canvas.
After a few days at his favorite fishing spot, my grandfather named me Hyun-gi, roughly translating to "bright ground".
He told David Sylvester that he intended his "hard, flat, bright ground" to juxtapose with the complexity of the central images, and noted that "for this work, it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear.
