Press Release

NEW ORLEANS - Heriard-Cimino Gallery presents new paintings by Joan Duran. The exhibition will be on view from January 7 through February 25, 2006. An opening reception to meet the artist will be held Saturday, January 7 from 5 to 8 p.m., in combination with “Arts Alive,” a celebration of New Orleans culture in the Arts District. The public is invited. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10:30 until 5:30, Saturday 10 until 5, or by appointment.

The seven large-scale paintings of this exhibition are multi-layered and textured, simultaneously well conceived, yet spontaneous- complex, minimal, dynamic and meditative. His works are the product of both natural and inspired process involving chemistry, physics, and the passage of time. His paintings reflect his Barcelona background and environments of Belize and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Japan. The paintings in this exhibition are ethereal, yet grounded, imparting a vision of spirit and substance.

In her essay, “Liquid Islands,” written this exhibition‘s catalog, Lorna Scott Fox states: Joan Duran has moved from the impassioned, calligraphic gestuality of his youthful work, to an almost detached observation of the operations that coalesce into the inhuman beauty of his latest experiments. They hint at ceramics, a similar fusion of art and science around the transformation of matter, with its unpredictable mutations that withhold surface characteristics to the last; they recall the fascination of seaside engineering, channeling the ocean between precarious dykes into miniature lakes and moats...like slow lavas, neither liquid nor solid, land nor sea, but finding their own pathways, Joan Duran’s latest images have all the disturbing beauty and uncertainty of the present dissolution of everything we thought we knew.”

Joan Duran was born and educated in Barcelona. In 1967, Duran left for Paris where he had been awarded a scholarship by the French Government to the Ecole Superieur des Beaux-Arts. After his return to Barcelona, he traveled throughout Asia before settling in Belize in 1972, where he participated in the movement towards Belizean political independence. Duran resumed painting in 1985 and now resides in Merida, Mexico.

Over the years Duran has exhibited in Spain as well as France, Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and the United States. The artist has had major exhibitions of his abstract paintings in Mexico City at the Museo Carrilo Gil, and the Casa Lamm, the Pinacoteca Del Estado Juan Gamboa Guzman in Merida, and the Museo de Arte Moderna in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In 1995, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans exhibited an extensive body of his work.