Carlos Beltran Arechiga

Painting with animated blobs and geometric buildings
Carlos Beltran Arechiga, Untitled IV, 2024, Oil and Acrylic on Linen, Courtesy of the Artist and Tufenkian Fine Arts.

CARLOS BELTRAN ARECHIGA
Membrana       
Jan 27 – Mar 14, 2025
Artist Talk: Monday, January 27 @ 6pm
Reception: Monday, January 27 @ 7-9pm

Carlos Beltran Arechiga generally organizes his paintings around self-invented geometric structures with rigid blocky forms, whose edifices allude, both explicitly and implicitly, to the official policies and unspoken arrangements that over-determine access and equity in our contemporary social ecosystems. As a first generation Mexican-American, he often invokes the familiar archetypical modernist home in order to question, but also to re-affirm, the legacy of the so-called American Dream. But he doesn’t stop there, Beltran Arechiga depicts his imaginary cities as both desolate and fertile, in states of chaos and disorder, generative, in part, precisely because of their perpetual precarity.
 
For Membrana (Membrane), his upcoming solo exhibition at Cerritos College Art Gallery, Beltran Arechiga will present new works from the titular Membrana series, alongside a selection of pieces from other recent series, including Anocherer (Dusk) and Endemia (Endemic). Starting with Endemia, Beltran Arechiga began populating his paintings with otherworldly and amorphous forms that frequently display a vitality and liveliness akin to the viral microbial organisms that are forever moving in and out of our own corporeal bodies. There is, in fact, a heavy reliance on rose and pinkish color palettes for these more recent biomorphic figures, which sit somewhere between the bloody fleshiness of a child’s birth and the imaginative fantasia of a folk art alebrije. Painted on inherited construction tarps, well-trodden and previously stained, Beltran Arechiga coaxes these fantastical creatures to appear, like some Surrealist Rorschach blots come to life, here to invade our bodies, our minds, and, quite possibly, our souls.
 
Carlos Beltran-Arechiga (b. 1972, Mexico City, Mexico) received his Bachelor of Studio Arts from the Universidad de Guadalajara. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions at The Torrance Art Museum (2023); Los Angeles Mission College (2019); the Irvine Fine Arts Center (2019); the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum (2018); the Bowers Museum (2017); and the Brand Art Center (2016). He is represented by Tufenkian Fine Arts in Glendale, California.