Drawing Thought: How Drawing Helps us Observe, Discover, and Invent

Abstract

aims into art created with electronic tools. His early analog work shows his interest in geometries and overlaid patterning, and these two themes remained throughout his career. The imagery is conceptually reformulated as his practice evolves through experiments with new ways of working. Leonardo readers will no doubt appreciate the shot of Acevedo’s image titled Skull v2 on the cover of the journal (Volume 34, Number 4, 2001). His 4D Memory Cluster was reproduced on the back cover of the same issue. The three main periods that define Acevedo’s evolution are presented chronologically in the volume. From 1977 to 1987, his analog period, he used traditional media, painting, drawing, and film. The digital period extends from 1983 through 2007. Because this work was mathematical and included a focus on symmetrical operations, it gave him a perfect foundation for the digital environment. Indeed, his work dramatically demonstrates an artmaking approach that was a particularly good fit since his style meshed conceptually with the supporting language of digital tools—regardless of whether his goals were twoor three-dimensional. The new technologies additionally aided him in creating visually overlapping sequences or merging coexisting levels of reality, two of his recurring themes. Also emblematic of his vision is imagery that has a metaphysical bent, sometimes expressed with geometrical abstraction and sometimes with figuration. In 2007 Acevedo shifted into an Electronic Visual Music (EVM) period, a term he coined in 2013. These pieces include a synesthetic element as well as computer animation. The synesthesia discussion of the EVM period reminded me that the recent focus on genetic synesthesia has made it easy to lose sight of artwork that aims to compel audiences to engage on multiple sensory levels. Acevedo deals with synesthesia phenomenologically, integrating realtime video-mix workflows into his audiovisual studio practice. Of the four essays, I found art critic Peter Frank’s the most informative, succinctly capturing Acevedo’s evolution from a pioneer of desktop computer art in the early 1980s to his music videos period. According to Frank, Acevedo sets computergenerated structures and manipulated images in motion, one morphing into the next in response to sound composed by and large by collaborators. This insight points to the one downside of this book: electronic jazz collaborations resist printed publication. Since Acevedo began as an analog artist, I was particularly fascinated by the way his digital video and digital print work resonate with his roots in painting, which appears to remain at the core of his practice conceptually. Since his career began, he has shown his work in over 135 group and solo art exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally. He also has fruitfully collaborated over the years. Now his practice is to issue still images sourced from his video works, in the form of signed limited edition prints and sometimes as NFTs. To summarize, Victor Acevedo’s overall oeuvre reveals that the worlds he creates are both fragmented and unified. They are examples of the kinds of thoughtful paradoxes visual art can successfully present conceptually. In Acevedo’s case, he effectively blends infinite repetition with variations in patterns and arrangements that mesh form with figurative and abstract elements. The end results are tantalizing because they do not feel designed despite his geometrical and mathematical prowess. It does not seem that he sets out to illustrate a particular idea so much as to intuitively compose it as he brings a dynamic resonance and harmony to the final compositions. Within this, as this book conveys, we find an experimental spirit that creates echoes of both the mundane and the otherworldly. In closing, I highly recommend this volume to those interested in the new media pioneers as well as to art and geometry enthusiasts. Given the breadth of Acevedo’s work, it is also a book for library shelves. It not only offers a compelling introduction to this artist’s exceptional and complex artistic repertoire but also probes the career of a unique artistic voice. We learn about how Acevedo’s early experimentation with art and geometry using analog media provided a good foundation for his embrace of the digital tools that began to enter the culture at the end of the twentieth century. ACEVEDO in Context is available at www.acevedomedia.com/books, and for a limited time each copy will be personally signed by the author. An eBook edition will also be issued. While it may eventually become available on commercial sites like Amazon, the kind of limited approach Acevedo is using as he rolls out this volume suggests that artists frequently choose to initially limit editions as they make their work available.