A work like Omar Chacon’s wild, colorful “Sancocho Trifasico” looks as abstract as art can be,

Omar Chacon, "Sancocho Trifasico," 2006, acrylic on canvas.

with its peacock-feather dot-and-curve shapes streaming across the surface of the canvas. But as with much non-representational painting today, this image is highly referential. Chacon, 27, was born in Colombia but moved to the States when he was 10. Today, he resides in New York, but still feels strong ties to his Latin American heritage and hopes to establish a studio in Colombia.

“My work always comes from somewhere; it is not pure abstraction,” he says. “It is always operating at a conceptual level.” The dots in “Sancocho Trifasico” are quite personal, since they evoke for the artist a memory of his grandfather, a self-taught artist, making an abstract painting of small dots. The dots also came to represent people, more specifically “the masses, as in a peace protest,” he says, and adds that “the metallic grays intentionally recall the armor of the Spanish conquistadors.” Actually, each oval form is in a sense an individual, since each is carefully made with a buildup of acrylic paint on a plastic surface and the acrylic then peeled off and glued onto the canvas. The starting point for his palette was the red, yellow and black of the Spanish flag, which Chacon made tropical by adding green, blue and purple—colors reminiscent of the plumage of exotic birds. They are also meant to recall the festive hues of indigenous textiles. The picture, like many of his abstractions, is meant to represent the “mestizo mix,” the blending of many cultures to form the richness of contemporary Latin American life, a concept even reflected in the title: “Sancocho” is a Latin American soup that blends elements from Spain and indigenous cultures, while “trifasico” refers to the combination of meat, fish and pork in a single dish.