It feels like Javier Peláez is working through something, the kind of profound human experience whose emotions formulate universal psychological archetypes. In a series of about a dozen substantial new oil on linen paintings, the Mexico City-based artist explores a visual premise of shifting planes, neuro-cognitive spatial resilience, poetic allegory, and emotional palette. It’s predominantly abstract work, but it’s clear both from its pure optical qualities and specific imagery from the recurring motif of the title, Broken Tree, that this work carries a meaningful narrative within its elements.

There is an almost architectural quality to the cantilevered tiles of color, but with an off-kilter illusion of planar space. Neither only layered or stacked or floated, rather these prismatic shapes are arranged on a continuum of structural stances, informed by casual shifts from translucence to opacity. In works such as “Broken Tree #1,” the gentle and clean but sharp and strict shards perform the entirety of the color wheel, tertiary and beyond, within their flat and angled planes. As purple and yellow, and teal triangles and rhomboids intersect, overlap, and pull apart from each other, they generate new shades within their shifting tectonic choreographies. An occasional trompe l’oeil shadow complicates the purity of the abstraction.

Javier Peláez, Broken Tree #4, 2019, courtesy William Turner Gallery

The smooth gradients of even the most rainbow-saturated backgrounds forestall notions of pictorial setting but still create emotional atmospheres and sturdy floors if not expansive spaces. The arboreal limbs that emerge and dominate the pictures require some kind of “place” to be; a sterile emptiness would not do at all. An emotional tone of scattering and assembly, of a place beyond time because it is of the mind, is essential to the narrative fullness of the pictures. The way the artist employs three different styles of painting—the tissue-paper textured forms, the smooth hombre of the grounds, and the painterly rendering of the wood and bark —does create a version of complexity within the pictures that operates like spatial distinctions in their obvious tensions, digressions and degrees of separateness. But at the same time this technique imparts no information of any personal or literary nature, so that the context of the story—of whatever is going on with those trees —remains both poignant and ambiguous.

And about those trees. The broken wooden limbs that by title and visual melodrama are the protagonists of these rarefied scenarios are rendered in a rough realism. The mottled, earth-toned bodies of the bark-like skin and splinters like bone contrast against the gem tones of the place they are. The uncomfortable overextended bending and the crackle of serious injury spark a visceral understanding in the viewer, an instant grasp of the allegory at the center of the almost heavy-handed psychological symbolism. Juxtaposed with the geometrical components, they—and we—are revealed as all the more organic, fragile, fractal, violent, sentient and shattered.