Story by Erin Parish
“I don't know what Color Field painting means. I think it was probably invented by some critic, which is okay, but I don't think the phrase means anything. Color Field painting? I mean, what is color? Painting has to do with a lot of things. Color is among the things it has to do with. It has to do with surface. It has to do with shape; it has to do with feelings which are more difficult to get at.” Jules Olitski
The paintings of Andrew Arocho (born 1994, Bronx, NY) sit comfortably within the long arc of Abstract Expressionism, occupying the fertile middle ground between color field painting and action painting that emerged after Pollock and Rothko redefined the stakes of abstraction in the 1940s. This is a position many postwar and contemporary painters have circled, yet few manage to inhabit without the burden of history. This is the work of a young artist who has an old soul and who understands that abstraction remains an arena within to paint, not a style.
Jackson Pollock | LONG STORY SHORT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HksS8F4yx_8
One of the crucial distinctions between color field painting and the broader Abstract Expressionist movement lies in paint handling. At its most fundamental level, painting is defined by how paint is applied, and the Color Field painters revolutionized this practice. Staining, soaking, flooding, and allowing pigment to fuse with the support shifted emphasis away from gesture as performance and toward material encounter. Helen Frankenthaler’s stained canvases, influenced by Pollock’s poured paintings of the mid 1940s and her time studying under Paul Feely at Vermont’s Bennington College, opened a door to a new relationship between surface and depth. Paint no longer sat on top of canvas, it was inseparable from it. This quiet radicalism reverberates through Arocho’s practice, particularly in his sensitivity to absorption, opacity; his forms echo the edge where the painting ends, an awareness of the grid, an essential element in abstraction as exemplified by Agnes Martin.
Interview with Agnes Martin (1997)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JfYjmo5OA
The term “color field” was originally applied to the works from the midcentury of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, artists who were Abstract Expressionists. As the focus of contemporary art shifted from Paris to New York after World War II, critics such as Clement Greenberg began to identify divergent tendencies within the movement. Rothko was among those Greenberg classified as a color field painter, exemplified by works like Magenta, Black, Green on Orange. Rothko resisted labels, famously insisting that color was merely an instrument. Yet his belief in color’s capacity to affect the viewer psychologically remains foundational. His paintings from 1947 and 1949, and those painted up to his death in 1970, established color as a primary carrier of meaning, capable of producing states of contemplation, dread, or transcendence without recourse to imagery. Color is of utmost importance in the work of Arocho.
Helen Frankenthaler: Line into Color, Color into Line at Gagosian, Beverly Hills
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h35AJ2cn72Y
Importantly, Rothko’s transition during the mid-1940s was shaped in part by Clyfford Still, whose jagged, torn fields of color were influenced by the landscapes of North Dakota, to whom Arochos owes a debt. Still’s surfaces appear ripped open, revealing strata beneath, evoking stalactites, primordial caverns, and geological time. This sense of layered revelation finds an echo in Arocho’s work, where paintings reveal their own making through accumulation. His surfaces oscillate between inviting and resistant, sometimes thick with impasto, sometimes spare and open, but always attentive to what lies beneath the visible layer. These can be giving and energetic or stubborn, blocking the viewer from full view of the painting’s elements.
Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals: Great Art Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsz6bkkIHzQ&t=61s
Andrew Arocho. MOCA North Miami Pavilion Studio, 2026. photo by John DeFaro
Barnett Newman’s contribution to the lineage of Abstract Expressionism lies in his insistence on purity and division. His mature paintings are characterized by vast fields of flat color interrupted by thin vertical lines, or “zips,” that articulate scale and presence. Newman understood painting as an event in an arena, an encounter between viewer and surface that unfolds in real time. Robert Motherwell, another figure in Abstract Expressionism painting, brought a different sensibility of space defined within the canvas. His loose, open fields and measured lines, often suggestive of ships’ masts or horizons, imply movement and departure. Arocho’s work shares this maritime resonance, not as metaphor alone but as lived experience.
Clyfford Still Fused Form, Color and Texture for a Radical New Language of Abstraction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Nh1q4Q7whk
Inspired by the ocean and by travel, Arocho’s paintings are dominated by expressive, abbreviated symbols that coalesce into epic gestural abstractions. Concentrations of brushstrokes and aggressive linear marks convey frantic energy, while passages of staining and sluggish impasto slow the eye. This tension between velocity and drag gives the work its pulse. Like the sea itself, the paintings surge and recede. There is an “alloverness” to the compositions, yet they remain structured by an intuitive understanding of balance and color weight.
Barnett Newman Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sU6ft9Xjg
Arocho’s approach to painting is action, not spectacle but commitment. He makes small preparatory studies as a form of rehearsal before the critical moment when the gesture with a wet brush and arm alters the surface, often irrevocably. These sketches are uneven, provisional, and most successful when they combine staining, loose drawing, and blocks of color. While some artists choose to exhibit such studies for their perceived freshness, Arocho’s paintings are more fully realized. The sketches are traces of thought, evidence of a mind testing possibilities before entering the arena of the artist’s metaphorical bullfight.
In the finished works, one feels the artist’s hand and his mind groping toward the next right action. Process is allowed to remain visible, eschewing the magic tricks of trompe l’oeil or representation. The painting does not pretend to be anything other than itself. This honesty aligns Arocho with painters like Arshile Gorky and Norman Lewis, artists who understood abstraction as a site of emotional and intellectual struggle rather than formal resolution.
Deciphering the language of paint in Arshile Gorky's "Water of the Flowery Mill." | Art Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyEgYXvsftU
Material choice further deepens this conversation. In works such as Main Sail (2025), Sea Fleet (2025), and Black Ice(2025), Arocho uses acrylic, oil pastel, ink, and actual sail material on canvas. By substituting sailcloth for traditional canvas, he introduces a narrative that would otherwise be absent. The viewer’s awareness of this material choice creates a more intimate connection, raising questions about whether there is a meaningful difference between the two supports once they move beyond collage. The sail becomes both surface and subject, collapsing experience into structure.
Norman Lewis and the Politics of Abstraction-NEW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JctEmtj89c4
Arocho’s background as a graphic designer is evident in his sensitivity to form, opacity, and spatial organization. His paintings function as collages of marks and fields, where aggressive linearity coexists with moments of restraint. This sensibility becomes especially clear in dialogue with another abstract painter such as Vincent Dion. In their two-person exhibition, Where Color Transports, the point of convergence lies in their shared understanding of color’s effect on the viewer. While their applications differ, their adherence to color theory does not. Color is inseparable from perception, and perception is linked to the psyche. Working abstractly, both artists rely on the viewer’s unconscious associations, placing colors into forms where meaning is felt rather than read.
Where Color Transports Exhibition Catalog
https://thecampgallery.com/show/the-camp-gallery-where-color-transports#works
With Vintage Sails. MOCA North Miami Pavilion Studio, 2026. Photo by John DeFaro.
Ultimately, Andrew Arocho’s work embraces the sea as both subject and metaphor for the sublime. On and in the water, he confronts its unyielding power and its capacity for calm. The sea becomes a mirror for the self, a cyclical force that reflects rage and peace alike. As water rages and calms, so too does the individual. Arocho’s paintings ask the viewer to allow the current to carry them, to stand in the arena of the canvas and experience color, gesture, and material as forces that move us toward destinations unnamed.
In January, Arocho presented The Odyssey at Quiet Hours in Miami, a solo exhibition expanding his work into painting and sculpture. Maritime materials carried their history of exposure, labor, and endurance, allowing the work to move off the wall and into the room.
The exhibition marks a practice built with patience and intent. Arocho returns to the studio steadily, letting each decision accumulate. No rush. No excess. Just forward motion.
Still early in his trajectory, he brings a clear, driving focus to the work, guided by instinct and a deep desire to paint. The muse is not chased. It is met, daily, with discipline.
~
Comentarios
Aún no hay comentarios.