{"product_id":"aligning-with-bontecous-internal-wave","title":"Aligning With Bontecou's Internal Wave","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"bold italic large-font\"\u003eTitle: Aligning With Bontecou's Internal Wave\u003cbr\u003eYear: 2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003eMedium: Oil on Printed Canvas\u003cbr\u003eDimensions: 40 x 44 in | 101.60\u003cspan class=\"small-font pad-left\"\u003e x 111.76 cm \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Between Wavelengths and Street Signs, Gregory de la Haba brings together two lived systems of movement: the coded language of New York street culture and the fluid discipline of surf. The works operate as layered environments, part memory, part motion, where sinuous gestures echo wave forms and remnants of downtown's urban scrawl merge effortlessly into rhythmic flow. Curves, structural lines, and layered color fields move beneath the paint’s film like riptides beneath the sea’s surface, creating energetic surfaces of light, vibrations, and marks as if etched in water.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBuilt through de la Haba’s signature, multi-tier process of layering color over form, collage or printed matter, each surface becomes a palimpsest. The painting functions as living strata, urban decay and ephemera surface and submerge beneath translucent membranes of paint. Images gathered by the artist over years documenting New York City’s most authentic street posts: downtown’s sticker-filled doorways, tagged walls with faded wheat pastings and weathered graffiti, form the understructure of his work. Horizontal and vertical “stringer” lines divide and stabilize the composition and chaotic underbelly of the work, acting as both visual anchor and symbolic metaphor for balance, for holding tension between permanence and erasure.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese stringers, reminiscent of the structural backbone of a surfboard, introduce the West Coast influence that has long informed de la Haba’s practice. Surf culture, its endless pursuit of flow, its surrender to natural forces, its celebration of transience in the curl of a wave, collides here with the defiant permanence-seeking of graffiti: the quick tag, the throw-up, the battle for wall space in a city that demolishes and builds overnight. De la Haba fuses these worlds pictorially, letting the organic arcs of barreling waves interrupt angular letterforms, allowing drips and controlled splatters of paint-energy to mimic the whitewater trail of a cutback. The result is hybrid iconography: a stylized tube ride morphing into a wildstyle burner, a longboard outline threading through a faded wheat paste portrait, the Pacific’s vast indifference meeting the East River’s relentless churn.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBoth cultures, for de la Haba, are acts of inscription against oblivion. Surfing demands presence in the moment, the wave breaks whether you ride it or not, while graffiti asserts existence in a landscape designed to forget. In Between Wavelengths and Street Signs, these impulses converge in the East Village “sets,” a term evoking both the territorial crews of street culture and the lineup of surfers waiting for their wave. The paintings mark territory yet invite surrender; they claim space while allowing it to breathe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBetween Wavelengths and Street Signs reflects de la Haba’s ongoing exploration of light and color, of energy and grounding, and impermanence, where marks fade, waves break, and meaning persists. Thematically, the paintings resonate with de la Haba’s oeuvre: the search for duende, that raw, authentic surge of expression, in the interplay of chaos and control; the channeling of invisible forces (vibrations, life force, positive energy) through material strata; the autobiographical threading of personal myth into universal resonance. From his native, New York City roots to his deep attunement to the sea’s rhythms, de la Haba continues to map the liminal zones where opposing currents meet and generate new light. In these East Village sets, the artist reminds us that true creation thrives not in isolation, but in the charged overlap, between wavelength and street sign, between erasure and enduring trace.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gregory de la Haba","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46702095040702,"sku":null,"price":15000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0028\/8951\/5043\/files\/Amstel-Gallery-Gregory-delaHaba-painting-aligning-with.jpg?v=1777582921","url":"https:\/\/amstelgallery.com\/products\/aligning-with-bontecous-internal-wave","provider":"Amstel Gallery","version":"1.0","type":"link"}