A member of the Ecuadorian artists group Vanguardia Artística Nacional (VAN), Luis Molinari-Flores rebelled with his peers against the dominant trend of indigenismo, which consisted of often-stereotypical depictions of idealized indigenous life or Native suffering. Instead, Grupo VAN forged a new national style informed by international abstraction and indigenous textile traditions. Engaging with Op Art in particular, Molinari-Flores here employs the optical illusion of an ambiguous Thiery figure, in which forms oscillate between appearing to project outward—like the corner of a cube entering the viewer’s space—and appearing to recede behind the picture plane, as if the viewer is looking into a corner of a room. There is a discrepancy between what we see—three-dimensional forms that keep shifting their position in space—and what is actually there: a series of flat parallelograms. The shifts in value enhance the illusion by suggesting a light source in various passages, as do the corners of the composition drawn to 45-degree angles.
–When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction From The University At Albany Art Collections (1967-Present)