HONDO

Lewallen Galleries • Santa Fe

JUne 16 - July 15, 2023

Hondo takes its name from the Rio Hondo – “Deep River” in English – the river north of Taos along which much of the work in this show was made. In Spanish, “Hondo”, oftentimes speaks not only to a physical sense of depth, but to a sense of the profound. This show, then, is inspired by the “Deep River”: rather than meeting the landscape as a collection of locationally unrelated views, or in snippets that exist in isolation, this show’s work is about deeply, intimately relating to the landscape in one area – an area fed by and surviving because of the Rio Hondo.

The paintings were all made within about five miles of Valdez, NM, a little agrarian community that stretches out, mostly as rectangular fields, from the Rio Hondo’s banks. They are a hyperlocal travelogue, of sorts, each having been made along roads that wind to and through and around Valdez, along the Rio Hondo’s banks, and high above the valley on the edge of a nearly vertical escarpment to its south. They’re about what happens when we spend time deeply relating to one place through the seasons, or one moment or event – a sunset, a storm – many times. When instead of reaching out and out, wider and wider, broader and broader, we go deeper into the landscapes we know so well.