Uaio Antor

Uaio Antor (born 1966, Caracas) is a Venezuelan artist based in Miami who has developed a unique approach to geometric abstraction through a combination of optical art and color perception. He calls it TriBimensionality, because the work appears to transform two dimensions into three: the pieces are flat, or made flat with thinly separated layers of aluminum sheet intervened with color, yet the eye takes them for fully formed objects with volume and depth, and the mind responds differently to each work's contours and shadows.

Antor keeps his childhood alive by remembering his first geometry class, where he learned that a line is a succession of points. That idea transformed the way he saw the world: objects ceased to be single units and became the sum of their parts, and he understood three-dimensionality as nothing more than the accumulation of infinite two-dimensional planes. He trained in graphic design at IDD Fundación Neumann from 1985 to 1989 and spent almost two decades in advertising, as art director and creative director at Leo Burnett Venezuela, creative director at McCann Venezuela and, from 2000 to 2008, president of his own agency, Uaio Publicidad. In 2009 he began his artistic work and exploratory search in the intimacy of his studio in Caracas.

That career gave him a keen understanding of the formal principles of perception and composition, line, shape, color and form, and of how they can be manipulated for maximum effect. Playing with color interaction, after-images, shadow patterns and perceptual movement, and their combinations, he turns simple geometric contours into a relief that appears deeper or shallower than it is; the objects seem to shift in space when viewed from different angles, color planes move in time and space, and the boundaries between the second and third dimensions are diminished and reconfigured in patterns that are at times repetitive or treated systematically. The viewer becomes the author of the work by mentally completing volumes that do not exist. As the curator Carol Damian has written, the approach reveals that our perception constructs the world we know and have learned to see as our reality, and that of all our senses the easiest to deceive is the one we use the most.

Antor has exhibited since 2013, first at Graphicart Gallery in Caracas, where he held a solo show in 2015, and then in Miami, with solo exhibitions at Logistic FineArt Gallery in Wynwood in 2017 and 2018 and group exhibitions at the Coral Gables Museum, the Frost Art Museum, the Doral Contemporary Art Museum, MIFA Miami and Art Nouveau Gallery, among others. He has shown at Art Miami, FIA in Venezuela and Art Lima in Peru, has created public murals at Wynwood Walls and in Caracas, and in 2020 was selected as one of twenty finalists in a public call for Florida artists to create the new mural for the Norwegian Cruise Line terminal at the Port of Miami.