Beto de Volder: Errant Geometries

Beto De Volder begins with geometry, but as Paul Klee observed, where a line leads can often be surprising. De Volder's ink drawings circle, curve, repeat, and turn back on themselves — highly structured from a distance, but revealing irregularity, improvisation, and play when you're up close.

Based in New York, De Volder began working in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, as his generation of Argentine artists was reconsidering the legacy of Latin American geometric abstraction. Rather than pursuing its historical ideals of purity and order, he treats his geometry as a "living language," using repetition and variation to explore the space between the entangled structures of ancestral weaving and basketry, and the circuits, networks, and machines of a contemporary, techno-optimist future.

The dozen works in Errant Geometries embrace both movement and mistake: to be errant is to wander, but also to err. De Volder's forms follow rules without being governed by them, allowing each deviation to open another possibility and each work to become not a conclusion, but a new path through a recurring set of forms.

Beto De Volder (b. 1962, Buenos Aires; based in New York) has been exhibited at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. This is his first solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.