Christian Abusaid, “Art for a New Consciousness”

by Matthew Kangas

PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon

Continuing to May 24, 2025

Christian Abusaid “Double Circle,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2”. All images courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art, Portland.

Christian Abusaid’s “Art for a New Consciousness” is an intricate collection of pictographic images impressed onto raw linen with thick cobalt-blue dye. Inspired by an archaeological site in Colombia (where the artist lives), the 17 works on view all share a pseudo-textile-weaving appearance but are remarkably varied in their representations of the original rock paintings found at Chiribiquete National Park in the Amazon River area. Indeed, with over 70,000 such paintings at the site, the Bogotá-born artist who trained as an architect had plenty of source material from which to choose.

In this sense, this survey takes on issues of personal and idiosyncratic choice regarding the purported symbolic readings of the enormous murals by the spiritual guides of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Like early Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, who were drawn to ancient Pacific Northwest native imagery, Abusaid picks and chooses fragmentary images to represent and symbolize information he sees as crucial to our own era — ecosystems, biological continuity, and environmental warnings. Not so much the “tragic and timeless” qualities invoked by the New York School, Abusaid’s indicators act more as alarm clocks in the form of two-dimensional signifiers.

Christian Abusaid, “Birth,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2”.

The works are divided into two categories: geometric codings and frontal abstracted nature. Both act as virtual calendars or timelines, as well as flags or messages that convey the artist’s urgency. Midcentury modernist artists are further invoked as conveyors of abbreviated symbols. Optical art of the 1960s receive gets a nod in the form of Josef Albers (Abusaid’s “Square”) and Richard Anuszkiewicz (Abusaid’s “Double Spiral”). Early Judy Chicago is invoked in “Flower,” and Marcel Duchamp is repurposed in “Orb.” Nor should we overlook the deep tradition of Latin American geometric and optical artists such as Jésus Rafael Soto and Omar Rayo. All carry somber meanings of biological and agricultural import. Another hard-edge work, “Double Circle,” pairs two collar shapes which could be the attire of Indigenous priests. Another, “Birth,” integrates four curves folded together to comprise seven light- and dark-blue waves surrounding a diamond-like vulva. Similarly, “Union” symbolizes sexual congress with its two intertwining curves that act as “legs” around a central void. Crisp, slick and physically materialized, the work’s thin blue dye stains the raw linen so as to glisten and give off a scintillating glow in the gallery’s natural daylight.

Christian Abusaid, “La Mano,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 31 1/2 x 24”.

With other, more representational pictographs, the dye is applied thickly in emulation of ceramic glaze — or the inks and paints used at Chiribiquete Park. Not apparent in photographic reproduction, their inky presence also recalls the myriad threads in Andean textiles. The artist has gone to great pains to explain the original mythical readings of his selected themes: sun, moon, hands, plants, humans, jaguars. Rather than intentional guides, however, they read more as tour maps to the archaeological site. Such background knowledge is not necessary to grasp such associations, but does add more helpful frosting on Abusaid’s cake.

“The Sun” centers a triangular tepee shape beneath a 12-pointed star surrounded by eight figures and two trees which comprise an entire community. At the corners and the base, dots, x-marks and parallel diagonal lines could be forests, gardens, and the flowing Amazon River. Sharing the same agricultural motifs, “La Mano” (the hand) faces us, palm facing outward in a gesture of welcome.

Christian Abusaid, “El Ser,” 2025, textile pigment on raw linen, 31 1/2 x 24”.

All the remaining thickly dyed pictographs use the same motifs in differing proportions as borders. Within each is a central message of ecological import. “La Ayahuasca” is a native plant used in often hallucinatory shamanic rituals. Here the schematic human has up-stretched arms that continue above and below the central figure, as if the figure is undergoing personality transformations. “The Moon” is more abrupt, its horizontal crescent above a pyramid, all situated beneath an inverted U-shape of three parallel lines that may be read to symbolize the embrace of the Amazon.

Speaking of transformations, “El Jaguar” is schematically posed with its four legs around both sun and moon symbols. Its presence in Amazon basin cultures combines shamanic powers as a being who can travel between the physical and the spiritual world, and also act as a guardian, a warrior, or a deity. With or without the mythic meanings, Abusaid’s “Art for a New Consciousness” possesses considerable optical power packed into its reductive forms, ensuring the impact of its aesthetic as well as cultural context on a new continent, one primed for its own visions of a new consciousness.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.