Hamilton Aguiar

Hamilton Aguiar Biography

The neo figuration as sensuality of the tropics

The pictorial work of Hamilton Aguiar (Brazil, 1965) had its initial inspiration in the world of mural and
interior design. That world where paintings, the spatial fit of objects and the handling of lights are essential to activate our senses and sensibility. A world, in which the private interiority and the home kingdom are harmonized to keep the tensions and shocks of the outside life at bay. It was in this context of applied arts where he developed a refined management of different techniques and materials of the pictorial craft. An experience that had its field of action in New York at the end of the 80s, the city where he settled residence in 1987.

In 2004 Aguiar made the leap to the contemporary art scene with a painting whose fundamental
characteristic, from the poetic point of view, is the use of neo-figurative language. A sensualistic neo-
figuration of retinal inspiration deployed in flat colors, that exploits the scales and chromatic gradations of intense colors. Paintings where the background-figure-relation is gradually interwoven until merging into atmospheres and environments that transmit a great stillness. The look feels attracted by the explosion of light and color.

The landscape look in Hamilton Aguiar’s painting got accentuated since he settled in Miami in 2013. The nature and climate of southern Florida and its ecosystems appear emphatically in his paintings. For example, the lavish seascapes and elements of the Caribbean flora that surround Miami make their way into the works of his most recent exhibition “On the Horizon” (Blank Space Art Gallery, NYC, 2017) and “Hamilton Aguiar. Land and sea” (Newbury Fine Arts, Boston, 2018). In this neo-figurative poetics stand out the details around the treatment of light. The transparencies of the colors in the sand, the sky and the sea take on a volume, a moody corporality of human warmth. We are speaking of a combination of pictorial practice and craft subject to a careful technical control, both in the application phase of the painting and in the drying phase of the works. Pieces made of oil and resin in copper sheets on wooden panel, seeking to activate the sensuality of the viewer to submerge in the depth of these environments, leading us to a state of hypnotic contemplation.

Sculpture is an artistic medium in which Hamilton Aguiar has been working in recent years. A sculptural language that, similar to what happens in his painting, uses expressive resources of neo-figuration. An example of this is found in the sculpture ‘Everything turns to dust … some dust turns to gold’ (2015). It is a large-scale sculpture in neo-figurative language representing a great shark in gold. A shark that seems to advance undulating its body in a similar way to those that abound in the warm waters of the East coast of Florida. The piece is an explicit reference to what is already an icon of popular culture in South Florida. The experience of these years in the development of a neo-figurative language within the sculptural medium has served Aguiar to face more ambitious sculptural projects.

The work of Hamilton Aguiar is represented by important galleries and exhibition spaces of contemporary art from Latin America and the United States. His work has been widely exhibited in the circuits of international fairs and is part of important collections of contemporary art, both public and private.