page_title: Oscar Abreu
section_title: Psycho-Expressionism
hierarchical_section_title: Oscar Abreu / Psycho-Expressionism
caption_attribution_description: English: Structure of Dual Personality, 48 x 70 in, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2015
context_page_description: Oscar Abreu is one of the top three most valued Dominican painters according to artprice.com. Oscar Abreu is also a sculptor, art collector, cultural personality and performance artist, who lives and works in Dominican Republic. Abreu is the founder of Centro Abreu and of Psycho-Expressionism, an artistic movement that emphasizes causal relationships that characterize specific psychological states.
context_section_description: At the age of 16, Abreu immigrated to the city of Chicago and experienced substantial hardship and poverty. Throughout this period, Abreu pioneered Psycho-Expressionism, an artistic movement that canvasses the causal relationships that characterize specific psychological states.
  Abreu's works, in essence, deal with the question concerning what events cause the development or the stagnation of personality. Also, he entertains questions directed to the phenomenon of memory and human behavior.
  In answering this question Abreu has developed a language or patterns over the years. These languages are a culmination of distinct tokens that continually present themselves in his works. The tokens that Abreu formulates through brush strokes, colors, scratches and collages further serve as symbols that reflect the elements which he believes makes the human physique. For example, a pattern that transcribes itself through most of his paintings is that of a set of small squares that surround a central figure.
  The central figure usually symbolizes a particular memory or psychological state. Abreu's squares account for routine and history, two components of the mind, that in most cases, are not consciously accounted for, but that play an integral part in the formation of our personalities. Thus, he metaphorically deposits these squares in the background to represent their apparent secondary nature and to simultaneously establish the fact that they are a necessary part of the image.
  He represents his squares with contrasting colors, or within the same domain of the background color, to expose and represent situations in which we find ourselves every day.
  The central figure is constructed with layers of color, one above the other.  After this is done, Abreu uses a spatula and scratches certain areas of the figure. Through the scratches, hints of different and earlier color layers are revealed. This method is symbolic of the evolutionary processes that transform our personalities and further of our psychological histories.
caption: Structure of Dual Personality, 48 x 70 in, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2015
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