Story by Kevin Baird
Photos by Max Barkley
A hushed crowd of people gathered in the Mills International Center (MIC) to listen to Roberto Arroyo, a Chilean painter and PhD candidate at the University of Oregon. He spoke in his native Spanish: “When you live horrible experiences there’s always a chance that you will have a lot of hatred inside of you. And I did have a lot of hatred. So then I decided to balance this hatred with love. Its not about forgetting the hatred or sorrow, but to put things in balance.”
Arroyo displayed a haunting set of paintings called “Love Against Forgetting.” One of the paintings depicted skeletons buried in the ground as melancholy faces lurked in the background. “The faces you can see are friends of mine who were assassinated. This is a way of perpetuating their memory,” he says.
Four artists displayed their work at the Friday, January 28 kickoff to the MIC’s American Voices Winter Art Show. Beside Arroyo, the three other featured artists included Sarah Brothers of White Plains, New York; Hampton Rodriquez of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Alejandro Ceballos of the Mexican state of Senora. Each artist and his/her work shared an energy that flowed from the artwork to the MIC.
The MIC art curator, Kelly Tavares, began the event by explaining the MIC’s mission: to give people “a place to meet the world.”
Guests of the Winter Art Show not only had their eyes pleased but their palettes too. Tropical-fruit kabobs, Peruvian purple potatoes, and tamales were served as people laughed and exchanged cheerful conversations with their friends and the artists. The air was filled with beautiful guitar music from Kenji Ota. Kenji’s wife, Carolina Cabellero Segura, also performed a Colombian Bambuco dance that she choreographed herself.
The paintings of Ceballos are bright, simple, and Picasso-esque.
“I rely on spontaneity,” he says. “I like to play with form. Perhaps make it abstract. I don’t like to represent reality. I like to represent the meaning of reality.” The media also impacts Ceballos. One of his paintings was influenced by a Led Zeppelin song; another, by the book “Poesia No Eres Tu.”
“I never read the book,” Ceballos says, but the title stuck with him and gave him an idea that he had to paint.
The American Voices Winter Art Show will be on display in the MIC until March 18.
