In the Studio with Loriel Beltrán, Materializing Color and Memory in Miami

In his Miami studio, Venezuelan-born artist Loriel Beltrán transforms layers of paint into sculptural accumulations that bridge color, labor, and time. Rooted in the legacies of Latin American modernism and postwar American abstraction, his works dissolve boundaries between image and object. Through a meticulous, meditative process, Beltrán exposes artistic labor as form itself—where material and memory converge in vibrant, tactile fields of light and meaning.

WHITEWALL: You’ve cited influences ranging from Gego and Cruz-Diez to Jack Whitten and Lynda Benglis. How do you navigate these parallel legacies of Latin American modernism and postwar American abstraction in your practice today?

LORIEL BELTRAN: I think the way Latin America and the US arrived at non-representational work is very different, and I feel that it is useful to mark the distinction. In the US it was related to the literal idea of abstracting, where the work stands in as a distillation or allegory of something else. Be it expression of inner feelings, purity, spirituality—it was a stand in for something else. In Latin America, you can trace the lineage of non-representational art to Malevich and the Constructivists, and to the movements that it created, like concrete art and its variants. The approach is very different, in that these works don’t represent anything but themselves. They are constructions in space, or a visual field, and I think this is where the distinction is more pronounced. I try to keep expanding these ideas by making them increasingly complex.

WW: The process behind your works—pouring, hardening, slicing, and assembling layers of paint—feels both meditative and industrial. How do time, repetition, and physical labor shape the meaning of your finished pieces?

LB: Time is really important, and it functions on many different registers. First and maybe most obvious is the time it takes to create the work. Then there’s the time you can spend looking at the work. My works are so complex that you never feel like you can grasp them entirely, so they ask for your continued engagement. But then there are other ideas of time embedded in the work. References to Art History and ideas of color theory connect the work to “Historical” or “Cultural” time, which spans a few thousand years.

And then there is a geological component that expands the time frame significantly. Beyond the fact that the work is composed of cross sections of material that relate to how we study Geology, I have been adding some of the waste of what is consumed at the studio into the molds as a way to connect the works to one of our big geological legacies, the landfill. I take the foam cups from the coffee we drink at the studio, the plastic lids, the six-pack rings, straws, mesh, etc, and insert them into some of the molds that will later be cut and assembled into paintings. This connects the layering of the landfill with the layering of the studio, not in a symbolic or referential way, but in a physical and tangible way. I find these threads between the timeframes and materiality of our existence extremely interesting. 

How Color Shapes Beltrán’s Paintings

WW: As someone deeply embedded in Miami’s artistic community, how has the city’s unique mix of cultures, materials, and light influenced your relationship to color and materiality?

LB: I love the mix of cultures from Latin America and the Caribbean in Miami. I feel at home in this city of immigrants, where even the people who move in from other parts of the US also feel like immigrants. This gives you a freedom to think not only in multiple languages but in the framework of multiple cultures. 

And then there’s the light. I think the light is one the most important natural features of the city. The bright, oppressive, beautiful light that we get here. There’s something really special about the way everything looks in this light, mixed with the lush landscape and the bodies of water reflecting it. It gives you a different awareness of color to experience the changes throughout the day, and throughout the year. It also inspires in me a desire to capture its effects, to materialize it somehow. 

“The light is one the most important natural features of the city,”

-Loriel Beltrán

WW: In your recent exhibitions, from To Name the Light in London to Over the Sun, Under the Earth in Miami, your works seem to explore how color accumulates both physically and metaphorically. What does accumulation mean to you—materially, emotionally, or historically—in the act of painting?

LB: Accumulation is one the most interesting processes to occur, yet something we rarely think about. I often think of the way the philosopher Manuel de Landa talks about accumulations in his book 1000 Years of Nonlinear History. He describes history as a series of accumulations of Geological, Biological, and Linguistic materials. Just think about the way the written word has accumulated over time and how much our understanding of everything has depended on these accumulations of knowledge. I thrive on these questions that seem hard to reconcile. How do you accumulate Language? How do you accumulate color? First you have to give it a materiality, a body, and then you can start to gather it.

WW: How do you accumulate Language? How do you accumulate color?

LB: First you have to give it a materiality, a body, and then you can start to gather it. Also, writers like Michael Taussig who trace the history and origin of colors as pigments. The trade in mineral and plant pigments was really important for thousands of years, yet we tend to think of color as immaterial. Taussig traces the development of modern pigments to the by-products of refining processes of fossil fuels extracted from the ground. It’s interesting to think that these deposits of oil and coal were plants that absorbed the energy from the sun, and now, millions of years later, we can somehow extract the colors of the spectrum from these remains. This connects color and light to what powers the modern world, and what will probably destroy it. Ideas like these keep me busy in the studio. 

What to Know

Who
Loriel Beltrán (b. 1985, Caracas, Venezuela).

Where
Lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Practice
Creates layered, sculptural accumulations of paint that merge color, labor, and materiality—bridging Latin American modernism and postwar American abstraction while dissolving the boundaries between image and object.

Recent Shows
To Name the Light” (2024), Lehmann Maupin, London; “Over the Sun, Under the Earth” (2022), CENTRAL FINE, Miami, Florida.