Dimensional behavior

San Antonio artist David Alcantar says art is a powerful tool for talking about important issues.

“It has the ability to make us think about topics that are difficult in a way that makes it, perhaps, easier,” Alcantar told The Rider in a phone interview last Tuesday.

Alcantar’s exhibit, “Minding the Gaps,” will open with a reception at 6 p.m. Oct. 31 in the Art Gallery at Rusteberg Hall on the Brownsville campus. The exhibition will consist of more than 15 pieces, including two-dimensional pieces, mostly made of acrylic, and three-dimensional pieces made of wood.

“I am really excited to be able to share the 3-D work because that’s very new to this idea,” he said. “The idea that I’ve been working these past few years is negotiating behavior and, so, making paintings about that has been pretty challenging.”

Alcantar holds degrees in art from the University of Texas at Austin (bachelor’s) and the University of Colorado-Boulder (master’s). His work has been shown in more than 45 different exhibitions in places such as Brooklyn, N.Y.; Merida, Yucatan, Mexico; and Denver, Colo., among others.

“He’s also an artist that has been exhibiting elsewhere,” Gallery Coordinator Alejandro Macias said. “He’s an artist with experience.”

Macias said Alcantar’s work will benefit UTRGV students because he travels and is a practicing artist.

“I was looking for artists from outside the Valley, so I saw his work and I thought his work was really good,” Macias said. “It is always good for students to hear from the artist … and so, I’m really excited for them.”

Some of Alcantar’s 2-D pieces were transitioned to 3-D pieces using materials such as wood and acrylic.

“I am excited to see the relationship and the conversation, the dialogue, between the two-dimensional work and the three-dimensional work,” Alcantar said. “The three-dimensional work, it will be obvious that they’re related to each other. When the artwork starts to dialogue with each other, then I think the connection will be made more obvious.”

Alcantar said he has been working on “human negotiation behavior,” which is the main theme of his pieces.

“They’re all made from the same theme. The idea, I’ve been working on for at least four years,” he said.  “Some of these 2-D pieces that I’m going to show are actually quite old, because they set up a background context for the newer pieces.”

Asked what inspires his work, Alcantar replied that he tries to think how his work contributes to art history overall and spends time looking at other artists’ work so he is not “retreading ground.”

“Lately, I’ve been looking a lot at Eric Fischl, who is a painter from California,” he said. “I’ve also been looking at  Andrew Wyeth, who is a New England painter from the early 20th century. … Their work looks very different from what my work looks like and so one might be confused as to why I would be looking at these artists, but there are ideas in their work that I think is similar to mine. And, so, like I said, I’m just trying to make sure that I’m not re-stating what has already been said before.”

Admission is free and the exhibit continues until Nov. 22.

““Immerse yourself, so you can have a better understanding of why students take art classes and why they pursue art in the first place,” Macias said. “The show is completely free, just a few minutes out of your day, at least, and so, just kind of shatter that curiosity by attending and seeing what artists from outside the Valley are doing.”

For more information, email Macias at alejandro.macias@utrgv.edu.