There’s that Mitch Hedberg joke that goes:
My friend said to me, “I think the weather is trippy.”
I said: “no man, it’s not the weather that’s trippy, perhaps it’s the way that we perceive it that is indeed trippy.”
Then I thought “man…I should have just said ‘yeah.’”
Andre Razo’s Sharpie-stippled surfaces surround you like a sweet mist that feels like that joke: trippy, yeah, but perceptive. To look closely at these effervescent ink abstracts is to prompt adjectives that evoke sugar’s sensations: fizz, snap, crackle, pop. In some pieces, bands of color undulate without getting woozy, because they are governed by a relatable harmony, the artist’s mind. In others, a tight, fixed order of measured curves and consonant gores overlap to become something that almost coalesces into an image, a fragment on the edge of legible text. These works don’t need to be read. Projecting meaning onto open-ended form is a loser’s game that ignores the negative space as it pulsates between Razo’s deconstructed pointillist marks. That airy buzz of emptiness is the place where words fail, and art thrives. Trippy indeed. Yeah.
- Ted Barrow
All artworks are Untitled, 2023-2025. Marker on paper. Variable dimensions.