Mario Yrisarry

Art Brokerage: Mario Yrisarry Filipino American Artist: b. 1933. Yrisarry's work is based in a linear response to the painting field. Working with a spray gun and stencils, he creates areas defined by sharp or hazy boundaries, depending on whether the stencil edge is clean or caked from over-spraying. A notch cut into the stencil edge adds organic variation and provides an index to the set of variations the stencil will perform: horizontal/diagonal, right/left, reversed/flipped, and continued/interrupted. Often the same stencil is used in different works, adding a tentative sense of continuity to diverse themes. Many of Yrisarry's paintings bear tiny pinpricks where the stencils were attached. Each work begins with a gridded field. The stencil (or stencils) are placed according to calculations corresponding to the artist's perceptual analysis of alternative variations inherent in the grid. His mathematically generated compositions are capable of producing mysterious, asymetrical arrangements of form: irregular divisions often surrounded by reservoirs of space space that, while inactive pictorially, allow the whole to breathe. The end result is crystalline structure not unlike that achieved by Lawrence Poons through a similar study of the grid. Listings wanted.