Flowers have cultivated humans over time to evolve us and to teach us to slow down. They demonstrate growth, ease, and beauty, acting as modern heroes that captivate our senses. People have been keeping flowers around their spaces for centuries in a reciprocal relationship as they elevate and stimulate our collective minds and hearts. Lytton and Quesada explore these concepts, examining perception and the body’s interaction with beauty as it aligns with divinity, which is vital to our humanity.
In Lytton’s oil and gouache paintings, seemingly unrelated objects transform into gestural forms, with intricate textures that balance between illusionistic and visceral. These paintings evoke symbiotic relationships we have with the world around us, reflecting on how our bodies are informed by the spaces we inhabit. Surrounded by vibrant hues and patterns, a stage-like scene emerges. Memories and simulations intertwine, blurring the edges of authenticity from the outset, asking how could proximal objects imbue perceptions of ourselves and others?
Quesada’s decade of public muralism has centered on the ways painted gestures inhabit public spaces. His main interest is painting using movement and color work to transform public sites and excite the landscape. At the edge of abstract and figurative, his work engages with symbolism and textural narrative solutions. Translating the large-scale work into a condensed language for studio work is a meditation on materiality.
Elias John Lytton
Elias John Lytton was born in the United States in 1987 and raised in British Columbia, Canada. He attended the University of Houston where he received a BFA in 2014 before going on to attend the University of Florida and earning an MFA in 2018. He currently resides in Houston, Texas, and works as an artist in his studio at the Box 13 ArtSpace.
Angel Quesada
Born in Laredo, Texas and raised along the border with Mexico, Quesada has lived in Boston and later Los Angeles. Angel Quesada has been involved for over 25 years in Texas as a public artist, arts producer, curator, juror, exhibition designer, musician, arts administrator, digital editor, ethnographer, community organizer, and urban muralist.
Always searching for the beautiful and interesting, his work addresses a wide variety of audiences. Quesada frequently features the human hand in his final compositions and feels that body movement expresses a profound need for minds and bodies to engage with their surroundings. His artistic oeuvre can be interpreted as both hopeful and workaday in a wide variety of multicultural contexts and his ambition is to elevate conversations through art.