Virginia Jaramillo: Geometry meets mysticism at the Bechtler
'Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence' runs at The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art through June 8.
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on April 9, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. ➡️Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Review: At the Bechtler, Virginia Jaramillo’s full-career retrospective evolves in abstraction, earthy palates and scientific lines and curves
When visitors reach the final room in the exhibit “Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence” at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, they see some of Jaramillo’s more recent works, such as this triptych, “To Touch the Earth.” (Courtesy of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art)
by Lawrence Toppman
Virginia Jaramillo likes to interrupt you.
You’re studying the balance of color in her painting “Green Space,” where a verdant square intersects a yellow-green rectangle, when a paprika-colored line to one side snatches your attention. You’re staring at blocks of purple and gray-blue in “Untitled (1971),” when a long curving streak of orange at the edge of the painting beckons your eye.
“Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence” has reached The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art on a two-year tour. The show, which stays here through June 8, is the 86-year-old artist’s first full-career museum retrospective. It starts with Southern California “black paintings” of the 1960s (which aren’t, exactly) moves through work made in Paris and New York, and encompasses both oils and acrylics on canvas and handmade works on paper.
Some of it’s intimate, some cosmic. Some is as mathematically precise as Mondrian, some as wildly swirling as aerial topography. Just as you get into the rhythm of one room on the Bechtler’s fourth floor, Jaramillo throws a curve at you — often literally, as she loves circles and curved lines — in the next chamber.
Wall plaques talk about Jaramillo’s studies of physics, science, archaeology, mythology. They refer to her fascination with the idea of “ma,” defined as “the emptiness between positive and negative space.” (Sorry, lost me there.)
If you’re literal, you could spend a long time puzzling over the 1975 oil painting that gives the show its name. A reddish-brown rectangle sits atop thin layers of brown and reddish-brown, while a greenish-brown line creates a right triangle by cutting across an upper corner. Does Jaramillo mean small details are equally as important as bigger elements? Is she punning on Pythagoras’ theorem, where the sum of the squares of a right triangle’s sides equals the square of the hypotenuse? I theorized without a conclusion.
Does it matter that the title “Site No.3: 51.1789 N, 1.8262W” refers to the location of Stonehenge? To her, perhaps. To me, who didn’t try to apply familiar Druidic images to this piece, “Site” simply represented an elegant arrangement of geometric shapes.
The title of Virginia’ Jaramillo’s “Site No.3: 51.1789 N, 1.8262W” refers to the location of Stonehenge in England. (Courtesy of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art)
I’d approach this show chronologically. Start with those thickly textured brown-on-black and gray-on-black works from the mid-1960s, with titles such as “Terra Firma” and “Terra Mancha.” (“Mancha” means “stained” or “blemished” in the Spanish of Jaramillo’s Mexican heritage.) She made these two years after Rachel Carson published “The Silent Spring,” and you can see them as a warning for the future: They look like eerie predictions of the scorched earth left by recent western wildfires.
In her next phase, she smoothed the rough surfaces of paintings with beeswax and turned to masses of color — red, ocher, teal — interrupted by curved lines of purple, pink, orange or yellow that snap across them like whips. You can almost hear these paintings crackle electrically. Big Rothko-like blocks of color, often nearly the same but differing slightly, have a lot of weight.
Then come the “stained paintings,” big washes of acrylic paint applied directly to canvases in a dreamlike manner. Those eventually give way to the real stunners of this show, handmade paper works where man-made structures and the natural entropy of Nature seem to do battle.
Her triangles, squares and parallel lines come into play again, this time in a more mysterious way. I have seen the dormant volcano Mount Meru from a distance in Tanzania, but the painting with that name made me re-imagine it: The grays of frozen lava and misty green fog might have come from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ science-fiction novels about Mars.
In the last room, Jaramillo sums up her career with recent, more monumental works full of her trademarks: black, nubbly backgrounds, horizontal lines as shimmering horizons, circles and curved lines — now often incomplete, like shooting stars — blocks of color juxtaposing brilliant blue and calming gray. Sections colored like copper, gold and tin hang side by side in the wide, seemingly metallic “To Touch the Earth.”
It’s as if, slowly approaching death, her entire artistic life flashed before her eyes, and she blazed it all onto big ambitious canvases. Every memory became a joy she wanted to share, and the effect works as well as she could have hoped.
If You’re Going: “Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence” runs at The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art through June 8. The museum is open 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday (it’s free from 5 to 9), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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