NATURE'S MATHEMATICS

Upon first encounter, the work of Augusto Esquivel (b. Argentina, 1976; lives and works in Miami) usually evokes giddy reaction to his cheeky use of thousands of buttons, in creations that range from iconic paintings, like Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” to the stuff of popular cultural, think pianos and toilets. Much has been written about the button throughout history, both as a practical device used to secure garments, as well as for its ability to embellish myriad surfaces. However, Esquivel veers in another direction altogether, for his work is not informed by either function or decoration.

As a child, Esquivel was drawn to the mysterious charms of hundreds of buttons in his grandmother’s sewing box. When he later embarked upon an artistic career, he was unable to resist adopting the fasteners as his medium of artistic choice, beckoned by what he perceived as their transformative and expressive potential. Each of Esquivel’s works is initiated with a digital photographic image, enlarged until pixilated, that the artist creates himself, pins on a wall, and against which the buttons are individually strung on monofilament and suspended from an acrylic supportive device. Progressing button by button, Esquivel’s focus is the single unit, rather than the visual whole, although the enlarged pixilated image hovers, ghost-like, behind the scrim, silently guiding his color choices. Upon completion, the photo is destroyed. This technique of deconstructing artistic subject matter into tiny color units that lack individual coherence, in order to achieve a visually coherent whole, references the working methods of other artists, including Seurat and Chuck Close. Meticulously transforming zillions of tiny buttons into rational forms is mentally challenging and physically rigorous work. Not surprisingly, Esquivel acknowledges his obsessive-compulsive nature and the urge to create order out of chaos, qualities of personality that are key to his artistic practice.