At BMoCA, Anibal Catalan dreams up his utopia

The difference between artists and architects is that architects work for clients while artists serve their own imaginations. Architects have to deal with things like gravity, zoning laws and general contractors while artists are free to ignore function altogether.

But what if architects, with all that training, all that understanding of spatial relationships, color and the way lines intersect, were unshackled by the practicality of actually having to build anything? What if they could just lay their concepts down on canvas or construct utopian places without having to worry about a construction budget?

Likely, they'd come up with the kind of work Anibal Catalan has made for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

"The Land, The Space, The Square" is an art exhibit, for sure; paintings, sculpture, an installation in the traditional sense. But it is equally rooted in architecture, the field where Catalan did his formal education.

Catalan uses acrylic paint, prints, three-dimensional constructions and video to lay out theoretical landscapes. His works look like modified plans for developments or urban redevelopments, complete with buildings, blocks and streets. Or they resemble aerial views of cities and towns, stretched, squeezed, reduced to primary forms. He employs the architect's No. 1 tool shape massing together squares, rectangles, cubes and triangles.

Artists have tapped this idea before, of course. Entire movements have been built around connecting shapes, and Catalan's work has direct references to the great Constructivists and Suprematists of the early 20th century. The whole show feels like an homage to the revolution-minded paintings of Kazimir Malevich, the greatest abstractionist Russia ever produced.

But again, Catalan leans his work toward design, and that makes his painting less abstract, more picturesque and easier to access. You don't so much have to make out images as you have to figure out what Catalan wants us to notice about them. Which buildings stand out and how do they relate to one another? How is land divided into polygons and slivers and what does that look like if you take away the people and the cars?

Like any good architect, he is all about context, presenting his works in relation to one another, and more broadly to the room and the whole museum where they are displayed. All new buildings relate to the buildings around them (at least the good ones do), and Catalan links his paintings together in similar ways.

In the museum's main gallery, his painted lines and shapes start on canvases and then run right off their edges on the walls, continuing until they smash into the next painting over. Paintings morph into murals, and then, entertainingly, into three-dimensional objects. Catalan has constructed sculptural pieces with the same shapes as his flat paintings giant, arrow-like things with quivers made of flat, metal panels which look as if the paintings manufactured themselves into some sort of industrial equipment.

Technically, you would say this is an installation, one giant piece of art filling BMoCA's main space, though you could equally call it a show of hyper-related objects that could each stand on its own. Either way, Catalan gets you thinking about the interconnectedness of our universe, how all architecture springs from the same human tendency to organize things into patterns.

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At BMoCA, Anibal Catalan dreams up his utopia