Ever wanted to learn how to look at art? Austin curator Annette Carlozzi shares her secrets

"Start with your feet," says lifelong art curator Annette Carlozzi. "Ground yourself on the floor. You are here now."

Over the course of decades, Carlozzi and I have chatted, sometimes casually, sometimes earnestly, about how to look at art.

"From your feet, feel energy course throughout your body," she says. "Feel it spread out through your hands, then up to your head, to your eyes and brain. That's where most would assume you start.

"But it all comes from your feet."

Carlozzi has been thinking about how we perceive art — and the world around it — virtually her entire life.

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And she has been helping people get past the barriers — some of them real, some of them imagined — blocking meaningful encounters with works of art.

"Looking with your whole body is egalitarian," she says, emphasizing that there are no rules about looking at art. "Everybody comes equipped and everyone can find their own way. Honestly."

Carlozzi realizes that art can be intimidating.

"Everybody comes from a space of 'I don't know enough,'" she says. "But you do."

Stepping into the art experience

In late June, Carlozzi, who retired awhile back from the Blanton Museum of Art after a series of high-profile curating jobs, and I met at The Contemporary Austin-Jones Center downtown. Before we stepped through the glass doors of this focal point for recent art, we came to the corner of West Seventh Street and Congress Avenue with a sense of history.

The Contemporary, which also operates the Marcus Sculpture Park and a community art school at Laguna Gloria, grew out of two early 20th-century groups associated with such Austin cultural luminaries as Clara Driscoll and Elisabet Ney. Texas Fine Arts Association and Laguna Gloria Art Museum carried the flag into the late 20th century, changing their names and refining missions along the way, before they were melded and rebranded as The Contemporary Austin.

The Jones Center, a one-time movie theater and department store, is the perfect place to learn to look at art. Not too big at just two interior floors, not so small that you might feel unsatisfied by the experience.

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The current show, "Competing with Lightning / Rivalizando con el Relámpago," Los Angeles-based artist Eamon Ore-Giron's first solo museum show, could not be better suited to our project.

It progresses chronologically from the ground floor through two stages of his figurative art, then upstairs to two sets of large-scale, mostly geometric paintings.

"I start by getting a sense of the space where I find the art," Carlozzi says. "It might be a container, like a museum or art gallery. Or maybe it's in the open, like a mural site. But I always want to notice the physical context — where it is, how it is presented, those matters are easy to observe — and its intellectual context, or some of the ideas the artist is exploring. And you find that in the exhibition's intro text, usually on a wall at the beginning."

Before she enters the first galleries, Carlozzi pauses to read the museum's introductory wall text.

"If you want to understand the artist's work," she says, "you'll want to know something about the artist's personal story. Where are they from? How old are they? How do they describe themselves? Who is this person who makes these things?"

We learned from the two or three paragraphs on the wall, mostly devoid of art jargon, the general ideas of Ore-Giron's show along with his geographical, cultural and temporal influences.

"You know he lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Tucson," Carlozzi reads. "And also spent some time with his father's family in Peru. That he is interested in exploring the mix of cultures and environments that he's experienced in his lifetime. He's in his 40s, he calls himself 'Latinx,' and his story is an American success story, to use a romantic term.

"He's also a DJ who works with musicians and across many art forms including video," she continues. "That tells you something interesting as well. I'd guess he's wildly creative; that he lives among a community of like-minded folks; he's close to his family, both given and 'chosen' he's honoring and inventing at the same time. There are lots of people like that in Austin now — think musician Adrian Quesada or writer Dalia Azim, for instance. We've probably never met this artist with the unusual name, but before going into the gallery to see his paintings, we can feel a kinship with this human and his stories."

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Should the viewer, then, do research in advance?

"Not necessarily," Carlozzi says. "That brief intro text probably gave you enough to get started. And reading a label or two at individual works that you really like adds information and texture to the looking experience.

"But as a curator, I do field research," she continues. "I look at as much art as I possibly can. Not in a library. Not even so much online. But in direct contact. I keep putting myself in as many art spaces as I can, here in Austin and elsewhere. That way I remain fluent in this language of seeing, and my understanding of the world stays fairly current.

"As I've always said, it's not a job, it's a a lifestyle. It's both purposeful and pleasurable for me."

She heads into the first ground-floor gallery: "Enough words!"

Starting with figures

As she enters the first gallery, Carlozzi pauses to take in the space.

"Architecture has everything to do with grounding the body," she says. "For instance, here you see the reflections on the floor and the light cutting across at angles. We subconsciously steady ourselves, maybe. We find the rectangle of the room and notice the rectangular paintings on the wall, each anchoring its own space. Already, there's a one-to-one relationship of art to viewer, mutually steadying themselves."

Around us hang moderately sized paintings of people and places. The colors are bold, perhaps Southwestern.

"I look at color first," Carlozzi says. "The older I get, the more I feel free to respond to color."

While Carlozzi could talk at length about any single work in the show, she first notes Ore-Giron's consistent but unusual palette, which give the paintings a shared, familial relationship. Do they suggest the sun, the dry of the desert, the colors of a particular time and place?

"But someone else could prefer to look for light and shadow," Carlozzi says, "or delicate lines, or characters and other elements of a story — it all depends on one's interests and affinities."

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She notices that the paintings in the first room are interiors.

"They are images of domestic places, with specific people in them," she says. "The pictures don't look fully real, like those taken with a camera, instead they are dreamy, more like memories."

She notices distinct patterns on the clothing, the knots in the wood paneling and furniture, then knots repeated on clothes. The closer we get to the paintings, the more Ore-Giron's interiors, rendered like panels in graphic novels with fluidly drawn lines and flat colors, betray more radical departures from realism.

"What are these glitches?" Carlozzi says, pointing to puffy shapes that don't at first seem to belong. "These are cloud shapes, inside where they shouldn't be, and at the same time, not cloud colors. But maybe they are. Is this figure a human or a plant? Is she both?

"Questions are good," she continues. "I don't need an answer. Maybe I'd like many answers. Art creates a space of imagination. Enjoy the freedom of it. Move around as your interests draw you. You don't have to look in any certain order.

In the second gallery, most of the paintings are on a larger scale, but still figurative. They're similar to the early ones, but different.

"At this point, I'm looking for variations," Carlozzi says.

Some of the smaller figures are like participants in a sacred festival, to which she responds through memories of her Catholic upbringing.

"We all have our affinities, Carlozzi says. "I feel like I understand art that refers to Catholic experiences. Offerings. Being in the elaborate space of a church. The lore of the saints. That's just one small bit of my personal experience that I can approach these images with.

"Would the artist agree, if I asked him?" she continues. "Doesn't matter, really. It gives me a window to enter, to start my own riffing on associations, on potential meanings. In the truest sense, he's made his meaning and passed the painting to me to craft my own."

Moving up to the second floor

Compared to the ground-floor galleries, the upper rooms are like giant boxes that immerse the viewer in the shapes and colors of Ore-Giron's quite large paintings of geometric forms.

"He's making his own place," Carlozzi interprets. "It's like we're going from reality to art now — it's subtle, but we're in his world now. The geometries are overwhelmingly satisfying to respond to — whole body, eyes and legs and torso. We're immersed in this space. Just give into it. Don't look for words at first."

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After spending time in the first upstairs room, she wonders aloud: "Who owns these objects? Are they for sale? They seem fit for a museum, an office, an airport — spaces with large walls. How big is his studio? Does he paint them on the floor or on the wall? Does he have assistants helping him in the studio? How do you transport these paintings and who could buy them, given the expense built into supporting the studio space, crating and shipping them? This is another context for appreciating paintings like this."

Aside from the shift in scale from the works downstairs, other similarities pop up in the paintings upstairs.

"Again, I start with color," Carlozzi says. "But think about the details of patterns downstairs, the textile references, has any of that continued or evolved? What if we suggested that details of the so-called memory works now nod to other histories, other cultures? I think of Los Angeles and the great wealth of cultural resources and histories in that city. Surely the place has impacted the artist. I look at all these invented shapes and riff some more.

"Questions, questions, questions," she continues. "Why do I need answers? It is, after all, the pleasure of looking, or expanding what we think we can see."

The enormous, precisely planted paintings in the second room are undeniably beautiful. Arranged like ancient visions — think the Rothko Chapel in Houston, or closer to home, Ellsworth Kelly's "Austin" at the Blanton Museum of Art — they feel like Buddhist sand paintings or Mesoamerican astronomical charts.

"The artist is at the peak of his power here," Carlozzi judges. "To have such confidence to make a full suite of paintings — think musical variations — to command a space like this. I just want to sit here and reflect."

The paintings do seem designed for this particular room, even though the show was originally staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

"Sharon wanted to bring back the beautiful," Carlozzi says, referring to still-new museum director sharon maidenberg (who does not capitalize her name). "Here it is: Rigor and beauty. New stories, the past and present evoked together in strength, with clarity and ambition.

"I find it very inspiring."

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@gannett.com.

'Competing with Lightning / Rivalizando con el Relámpago'

When: Noon-9 p.m. Wednesdays, noon-6 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays through Aug. 20

Where: The Contemporary Austin-Jones Center, 700 Congress Ave.

How much: Up to $10

Info: thecontemporaryaustin.org, 512-458-5312