Carlos Setien
A veteran Kansas City artist offers a seamless fusion of abstraction and regional landscape painting in a major new body of work
Seventy years ago, the concepts of abstract painting and regional landscape painting were the polar opposites of the fine art world, but longtime Kansas City artist Carlos Setien’s “Missouri River Paintings” offer a seamless fusion of the two styles. His tapestry paintings are covered in splashes and drips of bright colors, capturing many facets of America’s longest river.
Setien’s paintings are enormous works, each in three parts, each part measuring roughly 3 by 10 feet. They hang loosely like tapestries and are made with acrylic house paints on industrial strength roofing sheets, but Setien transforms these industrial materials into beautiful natural landscapes. Painted with a combination of dripping and brushes, each scene depicts a specific location on the long Missouri River.
Setien grew up in Puerto Rico and Cuba — his family left during the turmoil of the Cuban Revolution — but Setien has spent most of his life and professional career in Kansas City. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and for the last 45 years has been making artwork and exhibiting across the nation, while also running a metal fabrication business in Kansas City. While his major recent body of work is about the Missouri River, he has made other series of work focusing on regional themes, including paintings of religious pilgrimages and journeys in Spain.
Setien’s first experience of the Missouri River dates to his art school days more than 50 years ago. He recounts, “In the fall of 1971 the KCAI students from the sculpture department and the industrial design department organized and produced a Raft Race from the Kansas City Riverfront Park to Booneville, Missouri. a trajectory that took four days and three nights, at the end establishing the most successful raft design and crew between the students of both departments. My raft was one of the first three rafts that arrived on the early afternoon of a wet and wintry October.”
Many might think of the Missouri River as the “muddy Missouri River,” especially in some of its urban areas, where the smell on a hot summer day is not always the greatest. But Setien’s paintings are anything but dull or muddy. Setien instead captures the hidden beauty of the river.
“From my travels and observations of many decades,” Setien says, “the physical scale and geographical span of the Missouri River provided me never-ending inspiration for the exploration of light and Abstract Expressionism which defines the character of the Missouri River landscape paintings.”
Some images might feel familiar to Kansas City residents, like the bright synthetic colors of “Missouri River Market” from Parkville, Missouri, while other paintings capture less seen yet majestic locations like the misty waterfalls of “Missouri River at Great Falls, Montana.”
While these paintings are quite abstract, many, like “Dawn on a Summer Day near Atchison Kansas,” show clear foreground elements like bushes and leaves along the bottom of the painting and hark to the impressionistic works of painters like Monet. On the other hand, “The Rapids at Sioux City, NE” is almost entirely abstract, a great blue canvas covered in dashes, drips and swirls, capturing the frenetic energy of one section of the river.
When looking at Setien’s paintings and their mix of abstract styles and regional landscape, it’s hard not to be reminded of the rivalry between two of America’s most famous 20th-century painters, Thomas Hart Benton and his student and friend Jackson Pollock.
Benton perfected the Regionalist style of the 1930s and ’40s with his depictions of American history and American landscape, and as a resident of Missouri, he painted the Missouri River several times. His paintings are in a clear, at times almost cartoonish style, and they often have didactic messages about nationalism, civic duty and heritage.
His student Pollock worked and trained in that style for many years before unveiling his then infamous drip paintings. Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries stopped painting realistic scenes, and critics like Clement Greenberg hailed a new era of painting without subjects or images. According to such critics, painting had purified itself and taken a great leap forward past the realistic paintings of the past.
While this debate, abstraction or realism, was contentious in the last century, today both Benton’s and Pollock’s styles have become iconic examples of American fine art and history. And while they might have been seen as contradictions 70 years ago, it is made clear through the work of contemporary painters like Setien that they are two sides of the same coin. Abstract styles can capture the specificity of the natural world, and a regional sense of history and abstraction is not made impure by painting a river. So why not add Setien, a native of Kansas City and alumnus of the Kansas City Art Institute, where Benton once taught, to this history of American regionalism and American abstraction?
But it would be unfair to consider Setien’s paintings only through this historical narrative. The paintings stand on their own, expansive, refreshing and calming. Their loose abstract execution, combined with only the slightest hints of water, nature and the open landscape, are truly approaching something close to universal appeal. One need not know these are paintings of the Missouri River to appreciate their beauty.
For more information and future showings, visit www.facebook.com/carlossetienartcreations.
photos by Jim Barcus
