Louis Vega Treviño has evolved a style that is both instantly recognizable as uniquely his own and deeply connected to historical precedents in American painting – traditions that include the art of Gene Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Agnes martin among Americans. Treviño’s work shares, as does the referenced tradition, a deep engagement with geometry. But, as with Kelly, Stella and, particularly, Sean Scully, geometry for Treviño is a generator, a matrix for creativity – never an end in itself. His reference to technology with geometric form is an anchor in the endless possibilities of pictorial space, and represents a rationalizing impulse that seeks both order and expressive spontaneity within the embrace of those opposing motives.

The surfaces of Treviño’s paintings are often optically unstable in a manner that challenges the classic 2-dimensionality of easel painting. His surfaces vibrate into a 3rddimension in an optical “push-pull” that reminds us of the visual theories of Hans Hoffman. In these remarkable paintings, the eye wanders over an almost disorienting field of hues that are both sumptuous and audacious.

And in recent work, the illusion of a 3rddimension has forced its way into real spaceas a result Treviño’s placement of one or more canvases on top of a larger underlying work. This provocative new practice reveals Treviño’s temperament at its most daring, a high-wire performance in which he risks erasure of his own work to stake out new ground in American geometric and expressionist art. These remarkable works, which Treviño has named “Transforms”, not only transform the pictorial space of traditional easel painting, they extend the practice of technological large gesture juxtaposition of multiple canvases that was first investigated by Sean Scully in the 1990s. It is clear that Treviño sees new territory from the frontiers of geometric art discovered by adventurers such Scully, Stella, Martin and Bridget Kelly. It should be fascinating to follow his path.