FACE ARENA. MARCH 24TH- APRIL 23RD

OPENING MARCH 24TH, 6-8 PM

CENTRAL FINE is pleased to present FACE ARENA, a group presentation by Rose Marie Cromwell, Carolina Cueva, Jeppe Lange, Betty McGhee, Najja Moon, and Jessica Wilson, curated by Betty McGhee.

The works presented each deal with an uncoupled body, establishing a conversation between clashing visibilities and ontological/gnoseological states. Rose Marie Cromwell and Betty McGhee use photography to create windows and mirrors, recording beginnings and endings, and what frames them.

Carolina Cueva and Najja Moon turn to sculpture as conductors and containers for the mind to transmit or inhabit. Jessica Wilson and Jeppe Lange work in tandem with CGI and AI to reflect new mediations, new exchanges, their videos being a surface/projection of something much more complex occurring beneath. The circuitry of our bodies, our power grids, and our networks autonomously churn away as we deal with two faces.

In Not Normally At Rest (2020), Jessica Wilson uses CGI to animate four psychoanalytic sessions conducted by a duplex wall outlet. Each session begins and ends with a quiet synthesizer rendition of Alice Deejay’s 1999 single “Better Off Alone,” always cycling back to the fundamental question of their dialectic. The top outlet plays the analyst, while the one beneath plays the analysand.[1] Each session presents a different anxiety that the analysand is experiencing: nightmares, horror, shame, and death. Wilson uses the outlet’s connection to the power source, the “grid” as it were, as its 'metaphor' opening up a space of infinite connections and collapsed boundaries. Haunted by surge protectors and plugs, the precarious little face is tormented by a vast network of cables, revealing the total chaos that lies beneath this everyday apparatus that seamlessly blends into the environment.

Interweaving Rose Marie Cromwell’s black-and-white series, Eclipse (2020) and A Geological Survey (2022 - present), an entanglement of psychological space and somatic reality emerges in a new sequence. Respectively documenting her postpartum experience and her homecoming to the American West, Cromwell peers from a precipice between being a mother and daughter, between fear and hope, watching them age and grow beside her.

The genre of family portraiture disarms the viewer, making us receptive, and more porous to the anxieties that undulate beneath the surface material. The Hammock (2023), a portrait of Cromwell’s mother, is a discomfiting view of vitality and mortality overlapping. This internal conflict quietly hums throughout her portraits, still life, and landscapes; Set against a barren desert, the abandoned Water Tank (2022) evokes as many existential threats as any other image: we notice it because it is not what it is supposed to be.

Betty McGhee’s self-portraits cut the density of the domestic space, inserting her gaze as an elusive yet demanding subject. My old friend and my old lady (2024) appears like a burning image, with confidential documents falling into a red glare. Between a desire to be witnessed and to erase herself entirely, she severs her body in the frame, cheating her face from the camera while a portion stares back through the monitor, dividing herself again as photographer and subject.

Rooted in the physical limits of immigration, Carolina Cueva’s sculptures posit a way for the mind and body to exist separately. The many faces of Muya (2022), which means garden in Quechua, spawn an image of a Hydra resisting the cauterizing effects of displacement. Eucalyptus leaves entwine themselves around the faces of grandmother, mother, and artist, forming new roots and leaves at the site of separation. Though the ceramic and adobe sculptures possess undeniable fullness, they are imbued with the artist’s desire to become nonsolid, her consciousness straining to reach out from the coastal wetlands of South Florida, back to the Andean Highlands.

Najja Moon’s Simulacrum of a Cycle (2021) is a mutable form. The wood panel leaning askew on the gallery walls creates a volume out of absence; its recesses form paths and boundaries, like a closed circuit waiting for voltage. Each opening produces a shadow, extending the panel into a shifting plane for light to sculpt, its dimensions open to new ideas of what it means to be complete.

For his 2020 video, ABYSS, Jeppe Lange uses artificial intelligence to create a chain of 10,000 images found on Google’s reverse image search. Beginning with an empty black frame, the video flickers through the internet’s massive image archive, overwhelming the viewer with over twelve images per second, finally arriving at a white frame thirteen minutes in. The total power of Artificial Intelligence relays a nascent, stumbling consciousness that struggles to calculate the human psyche. An intensifying score accompanies the odyssey of misunderstandings; with images sequenced exclusively on patterns and colors, the algorithm reveals itself incapable of relating to scale, context, or emotions.

Betty McGhee, Miami Beach, March, 2024

[1] The analysand is the person who undergoes psychoanalysis.

Rose Marie Cromwell (b. 1983, Sacramento; based in Miami) is a photo and video artist whose work explores the effects of globalization on the local as well as the tenuous space between the political and the spiritual. Her first book, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, was published in 2018 by TIS books and was awarded the Light Work Photobook Prize and named one of the 25 Best Photobooks of 2018 by TIME magazine. In 2021, she published two books, Eclipse (TIS books) and A More Fluid Atmosphere (Pomegranate Press). She has had solo exhibitions at DiabloRosso and Antítesis, both in Panama City, Panama; Institute 193, Lexington, Kentucky; and Filter Photo, Chicago.

Her work has also been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, New York; High Museum, Atlanta; PRIZM Art Fair, Miami; TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia; and the Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; among many others. Cromwell is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and a Getty Reportage grant, was a Light Work artist in residence, and was an artist in residence at Oolite Arts in Miami. Cromwell’s individual presentation, “A Geological Survey,” will take place at the ICA Miami, Miami, FL; from April 7 through October 27, 2024.

Carolina Cueva was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. Working in sculpture, performance, and 2D works, Cueva follows an intuitive form of making, layering investigation, and invocation that deepens her connection to source. Cueva draws from her Quechua Indigeneity, Andean heritage, and her cross-cultural upbringing. In addition to her art practice, she has an extensive history working with museums, institutions, and non-profits as an educator and teaching artist throughout Miami-Dade County.

Selected group exhibitions include Photo L.A, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Port Angeles, WA (2019); and Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL (2022). Selected performances include NADA Miami, Miami, FL (2018); and Doral Contemporary Art Museum, Doral, FL (2019), among others. Cueva has recently held a one-person exhibition at The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL (2022). Cueva was awarded a Wavemaker Grant and an Artist Access Grant in 2021.

Jeppe Lange (b. 1987, Copenhagen) is a video artist and writer whose work revolves around memory and perception. Since 2019 he has been working with AI, utilizing it both as a filmmaking tool and as a subject of examination. He has written articles on AI for Danish newspapers and is currently writing a novel about photography and the end of the world. From 2012 - 2019, Lange completed his BFA & MFA at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Selected group exhibitions include Photofair, Shanghai; B3 Biennale, Frankfurt; Thorvaldsens Museum; Fotografisk Center; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; and Institut Français du Danemark. Lange has been nominated in several photo and film festivals (Doc Alliance Award 2022, New:Vision Award 2022, Nordic Light Festival 2021) and in 2018 and 2023 he won Young Directors Awards at the Cannes Film Festival for his video pieces “Laws of Motion” and “Past.”

Betty McGhee (b. 1997, Miami, FL) is a Miami-based artist and curator. In 2019 McGhee received a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. In 2022, she held a solo presentation at Diafano, Miami, FL. Selected group exhibitions include CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Arts Warehouse Delray, Delray, FL, among others. McGhee has curated exhibitions at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; and Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, FL. From 2022 - 2023, McGhee co-hosted an arts panel and podcast, MÁS, with Yaneisy Reyes for Diafano, Miami, FL.

Najja Moon is a Miami-based artist and cultural practitioner, born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Her visual arts practice uses drawing, text, and sound to explore the intersections of queer identity, the body and movement, black culture, and familiar relations both personal and communal. In 2008, Moon received a BA in Studio Art and Communications Studies from Pfeiffer University, Misenheimer, NC. Selected group exhibitions include MOCA, North Miami, FL; AIM Biennial, Miami, FL; Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Miami, FL; Villa du Parc Contemporary Art Center, Annemasse, France; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Station Museum, Houston, TX; and Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.

Jessica Wilson (b. 1991, NYC) makes computer-generated animations, installations, and 3D-rendered flat works with sensitivity to the somatic and material effects of phantasmal or virtual systems. In 2020 Wilson received an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, and is an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten; 2023-2025. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Tallinn Photomonth 23, Tallinn Estonia (2023), “Perfectly Clear” with Kai Matsumiya, Basel, Switzerland (2023), “The Painters New Tools” Nahmad Contemporary, New York (2022); “Under the Hood” Riga Technoculture Research Unit, Riga, Latvia (2022); “Screen Series: Jessica Wilson”, New Museum, New York (2020), “Not Normally at Rest,” Page (NYC), New York (2020); and “Faulty Bulb,” Crush Curatorial, New York (2019).

Her works have been included in screenings and film festivals including at Callie’s, Berlin (2023), International Film Festival, Rotterdam (2020); Global Anesthetics, Athens, Greece (2019); Art Metropole at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada (2019); and Pioneer Works, New York (2018).

FEBRUARY 18TH - MARCH 20TH, 2024

Opening Sunday, February 25th, 6 pm - 8 pm

CENTRAL FINE is pleased to announce Luisa Basnuevo’s individual presentation, The Space, the play, the angles. This exhibition marks Basnuevo’s first individual exhibition at a gallery.

Basnuevo’s paintings recall a déjà vu—where familiar forms converge in a space defined by free association. Like a mise en scène where Basnuevo’s memory encounters the architecture of what was left behind, these works re-charge the empty signs of abstraction, digital forms, illuminated manuscripts, pop art, Abstract expressionism; etc.- in a field that is as malleable as it is unsettling.

Born in Cuba, in 1962, Basnuevo came to the United States via Spain in 1972. One could say that as a Latin woman, she navigates the complexities of identity, belonging, and exile in her body of work, and that these experiences resonate deeply in the re-configuration of cultural signifiers present in her paintings. A corner of a building is elongated and morphed into shape-shifting organic volumes, that evoke floating alien forms —as depicted in sci-fi illustration, from the 80’s; or a multitude of figures populate a background wrestling with readability and silence.

In a recent series, Painting becomes a space of play, where chariots moved by unicorns, horses or ox; are surrounded by silhouettes of people, vanishing points and stains, parading a vibrant field of signs. In one work titled “Shield” a geometric form, that could be read as a dragonfly’s wing, or a logo; generates an interplay of negative spaces, pointing to the visibility tactics developed by immigrants, and minorities, for passing through and passing by. This dizzying quality in Basnuevo’s approach establishes a parallelism with Painting’s condition as a fluid and restless medium, where operations dissociate everyday objects and subjects from their environment and spaces, gesturing to the play of uncanny signifiers, their masks, and the porous angles defined by polyvalent visual strategies.

Basnuevo’s work questions the translation of subjectivity, and the intricacies of cultural memory, talking back to power structures, by building an archive that is at once inscrutable and hyper-visible, where the notions of fantasy and research are treated as liberating tools, through which re-presentation can build its own space of expansion.

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, February, 2024

Luisa Basnuevo received a BFA from Florida International University, and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1991. Her paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL; and the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL. Her work has been included in presentations at the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris, France; the Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Southeastern Arts Federation, South Florida Consortium, the Division of Cultural Affairs, and Florida Department of State. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Frost Art Museum, Miami; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Miami-Dade College, Miami; NSU Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Fl; Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, DC; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Fl among others.

“Keep pushing me,

Keep pushing me”1

Over the borderline, the threshold redesigns itself conversationally. The gaze of a lion, with the eyes of a woman sporting contact lenses, encounters a solar storm where a man that looks like a sign, is busy cruising himself, in silence. Marks appear to rain over themselves, patterns travel, and a gathering of masked figures, move forward, in protest. Farmers with horns move around. They address the ground where abstraction and its signs, build a name.

A new dictionary opens up as a scroll, flanked by an undulating frame and it is a game. Matter breaks free from the confines of a pregnant rectangle, and pigment appears to burst, into a million cuts.

Presenting voices that come forward from various thresholds, a dynamic field is charged in a dialectical movement, so that the periphery is understood as plural, fluid, and self-framing, —racing towards an enucleating stop.

The paintings presented, hang next to each other, in solidarity, and yet, aware of the clash. In the periphery, shadowboxing the sphinxes of interiority, the expansion is what it is. And the center, is that construction that keeps policing itself, incapable to contain.

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, November 2023.

Artists

Loriel Beltran

Corinne Bernard

Chemu Ng’ok

Tomm El-Saieh

Viktor El-Saieh

Blake Rayne

Constanza Schaffner

Diego Singh

Frantz Zephirin

1.- “Borderline" is a song by American singer Madonna from her debut self-titled studio album (1983), written and produced by Reggie Lucas.

CENTRAL FINE

Corinne Bernard. Seemingly

October 22nd November 24th

Opening reception: October 22nd 6-8 pm.

Corinne Bernard’s first individual presentation explores the notions of appearances, sexuality, gender, and an elusive core that keeps on moving, generating reverberations/emanations that form a type of language. This language is accumulative, and it’s charged by an internal sense of logic, designed to generate conceptual and visual permutations, disorder, and gaps of meaning.

Bernard’s works reference the conventions and histories of painting, but largely remain within the field of ‘drawing’. The central, symmetrical compositions repeated throughout her work, are informed by religious iconography, illuminated manuscripts, and stained-glass windows, among other sources.

Bernard’s vocabulary, in constant formation, appears as an extremely organized system, and the works —opening like a book— insist on presenting the notion of meaning, and the lack of it, activating the poetic space through unreadable texts, shapes, and colors that act as disruptors. Bernard names certain aspects of her practice: To Frame1 , To Matrix2 , To Texture3 , To Write4 …All these nomenclatures, evidence an insistence on establishing parameters through a biographical approach. They indicate the pursuit of what she calls the “order of the elements” —be it textures, symbols, color, objects, carvings— all interchangeable, and, designed to destabilize the idea of order per se.

In some works, spirals, or maze-like forms, filled with text, that were originally poems, or notes written by Bernard, map a trajectory that’s unreadable, unpronounceable, and yet, not silent. In many of these text-based works, shells or random objects are inserted into cut-shapes or glued onto the structure of the verses, or paragraphs on her panels. The objects impact the works with the stamp of the real, appearing as solidifications, or hardenings under internal and foreign pressure, as a pearl within a shell. These real elements, contrast with the very notion of representation. The interrupt, confront, shock, the mediated mark making, with their ontological weight, transforming the reading.

Bernard’s works exist between emergence and disappearance, acting as portals buzzing with constant activity, revealing marks interwoven in a dialectic game, constructing a tenacious investment in the chronicles of the spiritual, indexing time and language, in a hyper-determinate, and yet, unexpected way.

Some notes from the artist, follow:

“…Seemingly, in terms of the ‘female psyche’, “You Learn to speak about things with an insecurity, and inflection, saying “like” all the time. Making a statement like a question, as a mode of self-defense…”

“…Seemingly delivers works that appear to be emerging out of one and other- or they are in a state of merging into one and other…”

“…The motifs in my work have many meanings, often overlapping and their meanings are not necessarily invented by myself but are preexisting understandings that I can manipulate by stylization…”

Notes

1.-TO FRAME

The spiritual, or the inference of the unseen, is initiated by the understanding of a portal. The portal is a border or frame that lets you see the inside, see the unseen by dividing outside to reveal the inside. My borders can sometimes be temporal (the ribbon that frames the work or is featured within it) or permanent (architecture that structures some compositions) or sometimes bodily, like the outline of a hand that is filled with water, sky, or gardens. The ribbon is drawn with patterned gradients, giving the illusion of something in constant movement. It is weightless but as it moves and intersects itself, it opens a space around it from the outside. The architecture is firm; it has columns that symbolize a permanent structure, a human-made portal where it is determined to be a point of access to another realm.

2.-TO MATRIX

To investigate the bearing of the seen and the unseen (which begets which), the majority of my drawings hold tension in what I call a matrix. Part of the definition of matrix according to Merriam-Webster is :1: something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form…The matrix takes many forms based on these compositions and it is always used to symbolize the mysterious origin; of me, my body, the world around me, time, space, you.

3.-TO TEXTURE

The textures in the drawings are drawn from the elements: water, fire, earth, sky. The tools to make the textures also mirror the elements; drawing with the pencil as earth to make line and form, creating shade and space with graphite powder as air, and painting with water soluble graphite as water. They are stylized approaches.

4.-TO WRITE

Text: cursive formed from a continuous line; the text embodies multiple truths as it creates a positive and a negative with its form. The written word is inseparable from drawing. To write is to draw. Text in my work is scripture, the communication of ideas, place, and values through stories, through perspective. I think about scripture often. I think about how many ways a story can be understood, how it can be manipulated, punctuated, decontextualized, preached, pondered, lived. A story may be a single perspective but the more persons that perceive the story, that single perspective is expanded, and that single story develops into many, like a game of telephone. The text in my drawings function as scripture; with multiple truths and conflicting ideas, many ways of understanding.

Books are an embodiment of knowledge, a mode of communication for thought, stories, and observations. Each book declares some truth, but how can conflicting truths coexist? Books show up in many forms within my drawings: in their symmetrical compositions (a book’s matrix is its spine), in the text that initiates stories, in their materiality as works on paper. For example, in collaboration with the poet Evie Ward, I have created a book of my drawings that are an embodiment of her poem, A Spongey Kind of One. In a collaboration, we also begin with two truths who attempt to negotiate into one: myself and Evie into a single work. In the book, neither exist separately; the text is bound in the drawings and the drawings simply do not exist without the text. This is a metaphor for drawing as an embodiment of word (poem)

Invisible Friends

September 23-October 17, 2023

Opening September 24, 6-8 pm

Frantz Zephirin’s work examines invisibility, opacity, and identity formation in ways that go beyond self-representation by employing a layering that is charged with symbolic, social, and psychological resonance. A myriad of hybrid characters populates these paintings: A mermaid wearing a blazer and a dress stands next to a man in military wardrobe riding a horse, while skeletons and zebras merge into a chorus filled with dissonance, and countless rhythmic echoes.

In her writing on the Spiralist1 movement, Kaiama L. Glover writes that, “The Spiralists highlight the possibilities for un-mediated connections between the individual and the universe - connections that in many ways transcend the at-times limiting boundaries of national and, even, regional identity.” Spiralism finds solace in contradictions and connections, in its creation of cycles that feed back and forth into one another: from identity, to spirituality, and back. Zephirin’s work is considered part of the Spiralist tradition, since layers of realms stack upon one another, creating a type of fluidity that reveals complex systems of meaning and cohabitation.

Frantz Zephirin b.1968, Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Zephirin was awarded the Gold Medal in the Third Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting sponsored by The Museum of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic. His work was included in the V Biennial in Cuenca, Ecuador; the El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among other venues. His paintings were recently included la Biennale di Venezia’s “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani; 2022; Luhring Augustine, New York, and are currently on view at the NSU Art Museum, Fort Laudersdale.

1.-Spiralism is a Haitain literary movement that emerged in the mid-sixties. Frankétienne described Spiralism as “life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connections (positionings in space and time). Not in a closed circuit but tracing the path of a spiral.”

August 6th- August 31st

OPENING August 6th, 6-8 pm

Desire approaches its nucleus and that which lives outside the mirror, the other. The impotence of ideals encounters what resists representation and signification, what insists on itself, aside from the Law. One could say that poiesis emerges as an ‘area’ where all building blocks of Language fall.

This presentation brings together a group of artists that rely on intuition as a methodology to mark what is always on the go.

Corinne Bernard

Myrlande Constant

Eduardo Da Rosa

Leonor Fini

Martin Jakaila

Anna Miorelli

Zelmira Rizo-Patron

CENTRAL FINE

JEN DENIKE, THE PODS

MAY 28TH - JUNE 29TH 2023

CENTRAL FINE is pleased to announce Jen DeNike’s upcoming solo exhibition, The Pods. The presentation comprises seven photographic works accompanied by a sculptural video installation, anchored by a seminal early video work from 2003, creating a palimpsest of the past, present, and future. DeNike’s practice investigates the gendered politics of the body through the lens of contemporary feminist temporalities. A phenomenological approach is foregrounded through an examination of the corporeality of the filmic body and how it moves through space, translating its anachronistic durational continuity to the virtual memory of the body through art historical time. The linguistic materiality of movement as a form of sculptural choreography regardless of the medium is always present. Building on her pods, a series of suspended male figures in regrowth presented last year at CENTRAL FINE, DeNike’s new meticulously rendered pigment prints mediate a trenchant reframing of John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-52). Blurring the lines between painting and photography her deeply saturated colors and attention to detail are copacetic to the Pre-Raphaelites' obsessive manipulation of painted surfaces in depicting the realism of nature.

In revoking the historically known female Ophelia, she shifts her gaze onto the male Ophelia, while simultaneously burying him beneath heaping flowers that migrate and converge into earth and crystals. Eventually, he is eclipsed by the materiality of nature, an ambiguous Ophelia, thus erasing, rather than tracing its histories. The works don’t recapitulate representations of the body, but instead, create a conceptual construction of new bodies through the kinesthetic capacities and articulation of visually repeating enunciations of gesture and form. DeNike initiates a series of compositional enactments – accumulating into corporeal sedimentation that moves through and with the performers. In It isn't just a matter of gravitational weight, an orthogonal perspective and dramatically foreshortened body delineates a torso pushed to the edge of the frame, his cropped legs, imply a vertical entrance rather than a view, flanked by fours works that initiate a distillation of the body as repeating horizon lines. The work's titles are extracted from a recorded lecture by Scottish psychiatrist and writer R.D. Laing where he discusses and questions the existential realities of the body in relationship to the process of presence and illusion.

Continuing, in order of appearance, the titles elicit a call and response: How does your head look to your eyes, Well I tell you, it looks like what you see out in front of you, Because all that you see out in front of you, is how you feel inside your head, The difficulty is to walk without touching the ground. Laing’s further use of the term “transcendental” in reference to experience, doesn’t mean in the philosophical sense of a condition of possibility for experience, but as something beyond, something transcendent. Walking through red curtains into the gallery back-room, Death of a Brother (2003) looms large as a video projection – revealing two young men – actual brothers – who perform an ancient Viking ritual, a protocol dictating that siblings must be buried head to head, in order not to mistake each other in the afterlife as lovers. Filmed on location in Louisiana, DeNike discovered the overgrown and forgotten camellia orchard nestled within former public gardens, originally cultivated by two eccentric brothers who grafted flowers in (1929). Subsequently, she has returned year after year to the site, amassing a significant collection of video and photographic works created from 2003 to 2023. Death of A Brother was first shown at AIM 24 curated by Lydia Yee and Amy Rosenblum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2004). Notably, two of the photographs on view were captured in the artesian spring that runs alongside the grove in Death of a Brother. Two decades later, DeNike picked flowers from the very same trees, to place on the performers, binding a provenance of place, and her fascination with the cyclical nature of time.

Weightless Memory (2023) a sculptural video installation, includes hundreds of quartz crystals hand mined by Jen in Arkansas. The artist has been mining crystals as part of her practice since 2010, upon returning to her studio, she collectively washes, catalogs, and orders the crystals repeatedly on tables; a performative act that culminates and connects the crystals as both geological specimens and metaphysical entities that later become part of her work. Weightless Memory translates a visual experience into a virtual memory, appropriating DeNike’s personal crystal ritual to form an intervention of the exterior into the interior, the real into the projected, and the site into the non-site .

The viewer must lean over a weighted shelf full of crystals, to peer through a peephole, hence espousing an intimacy and physical contact with the crystals. Jen’s cinematic perspective leads us to hover, fly, and float, as we ascend and descend a staircase lined with mounting crystals, row after row, stair after stair, her spiraling Penrose steps lead to the intimate discovery of a body – splayed out like the female figure of Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946–66). Through consecutive layers of mirroring, her crystal act repeats, while the camera seems to both caress the body and simultaneously elicit chaos; the wind blows, and flowers and stems are disturbed, meanwhile, the crystals appear to have gathered closer relocating near the body, no longer in organized lines the crystals scatter now across the steps like distant stars into chaos, unscripted the narrative continues until the body is seemingly consumed by crystals, or becomes one, spinning into the ether, disappearing, no longer tethered to gravity.

Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, told Gloria Steinman in an interview directly following her mission (1983), “Weightlessness is a great equalizer”.

Jen DeNike lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is her second solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE. She holds a MFA from Bard College where she also completed a Master Class with Stephen Shore, and is a PhD researcher at Glasgow School of Art. Bird in Space Becoming Dancer (2019) a sculptural video installation made of crystals was included in Crystals In Art, a comprehensive exhibition featuring contemporary artists working with crystals alongside objects from antiquity, curated by Lauren Haynes and Joachim Pissarro at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art with accompanying catalog. Jen’s work was included as a solo presentation in a year-long series of video artists at DOCK 20 Modern Art Museum Kunstraum and Sammlung Hollensten, Lustenau, Austria (March 2023). Jen DeNike in collaboration with Barbara Gundlach has been awarded an artist in residence at Monom Berlin (summer 2023) the artists will be working collaboratively to compose a 4D performance sound opera focused on merging performance and spatial sound.

Jen DeNike has exhibited internationally a select list of exhibitions includes: JEN and 9 Ballet, (with Rainer Krensetter & Miami City Ballet), CENTRAL FINE, Miami, Florida (2022), The Ulterior Narrative Cinema, Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2022), Black Swan: The Communes - KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021), Visions in Light: Windows on the Wallis, Wallis Annenberg Center For the Performing Arts, LA, CA (2020), Some people, Fotografie da Von Gloeden a Warhol, from the Collection of Ernesto Esposito, MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Torino, Italy (2019), Queen of Narwhals,, Faena Forum, Miami, Florida. (2018), Generation Loss: 10 Year Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany (2017), Number Twelve: Hello Boys, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016), The Gender Show, Eastman Kodak House, Rochester (2013), MoMA Media Lounge, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2012), Scrying, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2010), She Devil 5, MACRO Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2011), Reflections on The Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video, curated by Lauren Ross, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2009), Dunking and Wrestling: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2008), A Starting Point: Intrude 366—Dynamics of Change and Growth, curated by Biljiana Ciric, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2009), Fragile, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany (2008), That Was Then, This Is Now, PS1/MoMA, Long Island City, New York (2008), Under the Influence, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard, Annandale-on- Hudson, New York (2008), Jen DeNike, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006), PS1 / MoMA, Long Island City, New York (2005), Boys Behaving Badly, curated by Valerie Cassel, Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas (2004).

1 DeNike, Jen. It isn't just a matter of gravitational weight, pigment print on watercolor paper, 20 x 24 inches, 2023, unique.

2 Laing, R. D. 1960/2010. The Divided Self. An Existential Study in Madness and Sanity. London: Penguin Books.

3 Smithson, Robert. "A Provisional Theory of Nonsites." In Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1996.

CENTRAL FINE

KYLE THURMAN. DREAM POLICE

APRIL 30TH - MAY 25TH 2023

Kyle Thurman’s third solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, Dream Police, furthers his series of paintings and sculptures embodying the contemporary reality of contradiction. The two verbs–to dream and to police–negate the other, just as our affective realities, constantly in a polarized state, arrive at a neutral potential to go in any direction. A screen serves as the membrane between fantasy and actuality; accelerated by the internet and technology, the uncanny valley has narrowed to the point where uncertainty is not only a feeling but the landscape we now inhabit.

The titular series of paintings—Dream Police—depicts armored giants cast in hyper-color nightscapes. Shown in pairs meeting chest-to-chest or back-to-chest, the giants are seen from either waist-up or eyes-down, invoking a tension between the intimacy of bodies, and facelessness. Each painting shares the title Dream Police, followed by a possessive pronoun and a body part (Dream Police (Your chest), Dream Police (Our spine with shadow), Dream Police (My shoulders)]. Together the machine-like exoskeletons and titles call forth a human figure without depicting it.

Thurman was first drawn to this series after seeing a deluge of fandom TikToks that was fed to him by the app’s algorithm; time-lapses of 3D-printed custom body armor, inspired by the Marvel Universe and first-person shooter video games like Halo and Doom, would jump cut to the finished product, worn by its creator now imitating their cinematic inspiration–fully armored, emerging from the fog, accompanied by heroic music. Were this armor made of metal instead of plastic, it would become tactical; however, the plastic armor serves to materialize the fantasies of this fandom, begging the greater question: what do we feel the need to psychically arm ourselves against?

At the height of the pandemic, the physical public sphere seemed to vanish and then reappear beyond the screen, which in turn became our psychological battleground; we are at once awake and in dreams: social fantasies and fabrications sewn by open-source platforms. Recalling the values of a heat map, the prismatic palette is synthetic and unnatural, imbuing the paintings with the hypnotic qualities of the screen. One could say that the paintings are competing with the screen’s totalizing effects, not only in color but in scale: each jumbo panel measuring 48 x 72 inches, mediated by the glazing of the frame. For Thurman, however, the greatest battle is not won behind the screen, but in the grounding of the body in opposition to our untethered projection. His application of a variety of pigments and binding mediums gives each painting a fluidity and surface texture that at once conjures the body within the armor, and transcends the physical to address the character armor that protects us against states of fragmentation, disintegration, and dissolution.

Thurman’s Crown (model monument) sculptures reckon with the contemporary modus operandi to sculpt and manipulate the image of the ego ideal. His first iteration in this body of work was a grouping of gouache studies shown in his 2018 solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE—Like Crazy Nature. Now cast in bronze, each crown transfigures one of five psychoanalytic diagrams related to social conflict (anger, envy/jealousy, fear, guilt/shame, and misfortune) into rigid monumental forms. Thurman encountered the initial diagrams online, posted by an inexpert hobbyist. He found them fascinating due both to their posturing and their lack of authority. Just as the diagrams offered no terminal resolution, each crown is a three-dimensional network of pathways that appear to turn inside of themselves. Each placed upon a pedestal, these torso-sized sculptures appear as architectural knots in the process of simultaneously tightening and loosening, going up and coming down, and are essentially proposals for public monuments to affective life.

Dream Police embodies our lived contradiction—just as our psychic and physical realities bleed into the other, the paintings and sculptures question the permeable loop between emotional states and their consequences. Perhaps the dream in question is the hazy substrate that surrounds the armored figures, perhaps it is the figures themselves, who embody the collective dream of protecting oneself against the psychic and physical threat, or perhaps it is us, the viewer, who is drawn towards these fluorescent canvas-screens, caught between worlds of fantasy and reality.

Kyle Thurman was born in 1986 in West Chester, Pennsylvania; He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BA in Film Studies and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2009 and earned an MFA in painting from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2016. From 2011 to 2012, Thurman studied with Christopher Williams and Peter Doig as a guest student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

Most recently, Thurman was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta.

Thurman has held solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, at David Lewis Gallery, New York; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; Room East, New York; Off Vendome, New York; Off Vendome, Dusseldorf; Kostyal, London; and Office Baroque, Brussels; among others. Thurman has also participated in several group exhibitions at institutions including the de la Cruz Collection, Miami; MOCA: Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona; David Lewis Gallery, New York; Bodega, New York; Printed Matter, New York; Laurel Gitlen, New York; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; Cookie Butcher, Antwerp; Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid; Maison Particulière, Brussels; and Fluxia, Milan, Italy; among others.

His work is now included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; and Allen Memorial Art Museum.

CENTRAL FINE

Tomm El-Saieh. Parachute

April 2nd-April 27th, 2023

Opening April 2nd 6-8 pm

Tomm El-Saieh’s Parachute alludes to various leaps of faith. Years ago, when El-Saieh decided to move on from figuration and bypass the narratives expected from Haitian painters, a jump into abstraction implied that naming wouldn’t anchor his practice. 

Perhaps, this interest in what we call abstraction was informed by El-Saieh’s refugee status, as a child, and his encounter with a new language, societal norms, etc. One could say that in art and immigration there’s a discovery of new forms and formats, as one’s body, color, and speech become political on foreign ground. The artist and the immigrant must adapt to a set of codes, boundaries, and frameworks. One never feels completely at home, and an aerial viewpoint inevitably takes control of the mind. The distortion of the past and the urgency of the present, forces the artist and the immigrant to invent a lexicon that erases and affirms every mark on their bodies, which become bodies of work, addressing time under incredible pressure. In Parachute the act of preparing oneself for a fall, resisting gravity, and seeking shelter against speed, appears as an abstraction. Maybe, art could be thought of as a parachute, acting as a mediator between the subconscious and the real —in El-Saieh’s case, paintings.  

In this presentation, forms expand, evoking fractals, growing into larger structures, signaling a departure from previous bodies of work, where shapes and markings remained contained in smaller clusters. El-Saieh nourishes his vocabulary by incessantly re-working every inch of the canvas, until a million paintings appear to be contained within one large system, that never stops growing.

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2023

Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1984.

He has presented institutional solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, curated by Robert Wiesenberger; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2017-2018; curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Stephanie Seidel.

El-Saieh held solo presentations at Luhring Augustine Bushwick in 2020, and Luhring Augustine Chelsea, in 2021; as well as solo presentations at CENTRAL FINE Miami Beach, in 2015, 2018-2019.

Recently, El-Saieh’s work was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; de la Cruz Collection, Miami, among others. El-Saieh’s work was included in The New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage (2018) curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gary Carrion-Murayari, among others. El Saieh’s work is part of the permanent collection of the ICA Miami; Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), among many others.

Tomm El-Saieh has organized exhibitions at numerous international venues, as well as through his family’s intergenerational and eponymous gallery in Port-au-Prince. El-Saieh will participate in a group presentation at Gagosian, London; in the summer of 2023.

CENTRAL FINE

JOSE DELGADO ZUÑIGA.

INTO

ME

SEE

Opening February 26th 6-8 pm

February 26th - March 23rd, 2023.

Into Me See, Jose Delgado Zuñiga’s third presentation at CENTRAL FINE confronts the symbols used to define Chicano identity, presenting a double consciousness1 as a point of rupture, that gives way to the Real2 .

The painting titled I Am (2022-2023) addresses that symbolic codification, when reframing the distortions placed on perception by oppression. In the background, we see Miguel Cabrera’s 1763 painting, De Español y Mestiza, Castiza, one of a series of casta paintings3 which would provide a colonial Spaniard portrait of “the other.” In the painting, the fantasy of what “the other” looks like spans from the colonization of Mexico, up until the 20th century American caricature of Latinos, such as Speedy Gonzales and Slowpoke Rodriguez, from the Looney Tunes. Relating to, and rejecting these portrayals, Zuñiga merges an image of masculinity projected from within the Chicano community: High white socks -often seen as a sign of toughness- are stretched out from Nike Cortez sneakers4 to form a curtsey, recalling Las Meninas, and in so, challenging a culture of machismo.

From this effort to historicize one’s background and context, a lexicon emerges. An open mouth with golden teeth travels from painting to painting, accompanied by weeds with thorns, daisies, corn, sunflowers, and cityscapes. These recurrent motifs participate in a private system of permutation and rearrangement, as if telling the same story over and over, while focusing on a shifting narrative. The plot told by Zuñiga isn’t transparent, as some aspects in the paintings are blurry, while others are filled with details, and written messages hide in plain sight. Zuñiga’s decision to approach some areas of the canvas in a gestural way, and others in an obsessive and illustrative fashion, recall the psychoanalytic method of free association: In a psychoanalytic session some contents from 30 years ago, will emerge crisp and fully articulated, while what happened yesterday might lie in a blanket of repression. Painting is then an instrument that assists in the retelling and representation of one’s moving self-portrait.

In Into Me See, the gaze looks inwards and everywhere, as if reaching for an enlightenment that can make sense of the mutating skeleton of boundaries. This intimacy is seen in what’s engraved in the body, stored in the depths of what eludes speech. Veiling and unveiling reality, becomes apparent in Zuñiga’s decision to ‘brown’ all the pigments in these paintings, by adding a bit of brown to white, yellow, red, green, etc. Browning, then, appears as an invisible actor that unifies all the elements, by coating memory in the sepia of the past, while addressing Zuñiga’s nightmares, many related to the marginalization of Latinx culture. One could say that in this presentation, Zuñiga emphasizes the relationship between distance and control: Perhaps by painting shattered glass and burning letters, the artist brings hope and silence closer to the surface, in-forming them, through the resources developed by his own constitutional wound.

Diego Singh

Miami, 2023

José Delgado Zuñiga was born in 1988, in Ventura, California. He lives and works in New York. He completed his MFA in painting in 2017 at Columbia University, New York, where he was an adjunct professor of Painting from 2017-2019. He is currently the Lead Teaching Artist and Muralist at Groundswell, Brooklyn, New York.

Zuñiga was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant; and the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Community Grant both in 2018. He has presented his first Solo show “Quotidian”, in 2019 at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; and exhibited his paintings at the ICA Miami, Miami, Florida; the Luhring Augustine Gallery, Chelsea, NY; Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, in New Haven, Connecticut; The Ventura Museum, California; the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California; The Miriam and Ira D Wallach Gallery, at Columbia University, New York City; East Projects, New York; and has participated at the Bronx Museum program: Artists in the MarketPlace. (AIM), New York. His paintings are in numerous international collections. This is his third solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach.

Notes

1.-Double-consciousness is a term in social philosophy that refers to a source of internal “twoness,” experienced by African-Americans due to their racialized oppression in a white-dominated society. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois first introduced the term in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The term has since been used in social philosophy to address experiences of other marginalized groups navigating this “twoness.”

2.-Knockaert, & Geerardyn, & Van de Vijver, Gertrudis & Van Bunder, David & Bazan, Ariane. (2004). Trauma as an Encounter With the Real. International Journal of Computing Anticipatory Systems, 16, 81-91. The essay’s authors assert that traumatic experiences can shatter the illusion of social reality, allowing one to experience what Jacques Lacan referred to as “the Real.”

3.- Casta paintings used labels and visual details such as different skin tones, dress, occupations, and settings to distinguish ethnicity and to signal economic and class divisions. These images did not reflect reality so much as represent stereotypes arranged along a biased, hierarchical scale.” Julie Wilson Frick, Denver Art Museum and Dr. Beth Harris, "Casta painting in the Spanish Americas," in Smarthistory, January 17, 2018.

4.- The presence of Nike Cortez sneakers, a popular sneaker for Chicanos, draws up the association of Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who famously turned indigenous people against one another until he achieved the downfall of the Aztec empire. In Chicano culture, high knee socks are seen to be more masculine, by not showing one’s legs.

Opening January 15th 6-8 pm

January 15th-February15th, 2023.

“The beauty of the sovereign people is clear.”1

TIM-TIM, Viktor El-Saieh’s fourth solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE reflects on mythologies of nation-building, folklore, and sovereign identity in Haiti, the land of many mountains.

Like English knock-knock jokes, Tim-Tim also known as Krik-Krak is a Haitian folkloric practice that combines call-and-response storytelling, and riddle-making, among other activities. It often involves groups of children or students surrounding an elder who engages the audience in drawn-out stories, addressing mythologies, or one-line riddles that deal with casual topics. Taking Tim-Tim structure as a departure point, El-Saieh’s works could be thought of as linguistic apparatuses that reveal what emerges beyond repression.

By questioning the boundaries between nation and state, El-Saieh renders visions of his country which convey both timelessness and urgency. Haiti’s dialectical exchange between the symbolic and the real, could be understood in El-Saieh’s work as a complex system where “Indivisible family property, the Kreyol language, the forms of spirituality encapsulated in Vodou, the calendar and rhythm of communal life, leisure, dance, music are dimensions of national life controlled by the decisions of the sovereign people.” 2

El-Saieh’s work considers politics, and the codification of Haitian painting strategies, proposing a criticism on political impositions, through a set of formal devices. In his paintings, the figure and the grid contend with one another, sometimes holding or unraveling their raison d'etre. The grid, a modernist symbol that indicates order (in both material and social fields) was exhaustively investigated in the structuralist and modernist sphere. In TIM-TIM El-Saieh starts a multi-layered game that aims to challenge normative calcifications, by proposing elasticity as an option to the suffocation of organizing mechanisms. A brushstroke breaks into pattern, particles of light float over a landscape, bathing an army, a mermaid, and a tourist, in a cacophony of critical comebacks.

One could say that beneath the veil of the state, lies a personal nation —cast in the dye of self-actualization and mythology; driven by the idea that the scope of possibility exceeds the limits and agendas set on reality.

Viktor El-Saieh (b. Port-Au-Prince, 1988) has presented his work internationally. Most recently, his work was included in documenta 15th, Kassel; 2022; Luhring Augustine, Chelsea, New York, 2022; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 2022; The Perez Art Museum Miami 2020-2023; among other venues.

Currently, El-Saieh’s work can be seen at the Perez Art Museum Miami, and at the Miami World Center Public Art Program, in Downtown Miami.

1 Jean Casimir, The Haitians - A Decolonial History, Translated by Laurent Dubois, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020.

2 Jean Casimir, The Haitians - A Decolonial History, Translated by Laurent Dubois, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020.

CENTRAL FINE

NOVEMBER 27TH, 2022- JANUARY 9TH 2023

A hinge sustains the opening of a window and a door, resting inside the frame, discretely emerging as an invisible force. When we consider the openings and malleability of signs, one always looks back into the memories of the future. The Hinge examines the links between the symbolic and the real, the past and the present. Works made by these artists at various points of their life, are presented along new ones, amplifying the elasticity of temporalities and tension.

Artists: Loriel Beltran, Myrlande Constant, Jose Delgado Zuniga, Jen DeNike, Tomm El-Saieh, Viktor El-Saieh, Hunter Osking, Betty McGhee, Chemu Ng’ok, Zelmira Rizo-Patron, Kyle Thurman, Georgia Sagri, Constanza Schaffner, Diego Singh, Frantz Zephirin.

1224-1226 Normandy Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, 33141 www.centralfine.com central@centralfine.com +917-306-1218

October 16th -November 20th 2022

Opening reception October 16th, 6-8 PM

“We live in a world populated by structures- a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history.”

- Manuel De Landa

Central Fine is thrilled to announce Loriel Beltran’s new exhibition Over the Sun, Under the Earth. The presentation, which consists of new works by the Miami based artist, focuses on the tensions that appear in the notion of accumulation, and the ‘piling’ of time. In these works, Beltran documents a moment of generation, and follows it through to its conclusion, leaving us with a bird’s eye view of a complex system of relationships. These paintings - which are formed from strips of paint that can take months to dry use time to focus our attention, not segment it.

In this presentation, Beltran uses his own studio tables as support for the paintings, tilting them on their side so they themselves function as walls. As a result, the tables become extensions of the work, framing the paintings as monoliths. In the gallery’s space, their large size becomes obstructive, compelling the viewer to navigate around them as one would navigate around a labyrinth. From the front, the viewer is presented with works defined by reactive color, rhythms, textures, and their variations. From the back the viewer is presented with the scaffolding of the works themselves. The tables which originated the work become performative as exhibition objects, where the lines between each strip of paint, echoes the emptiness of each drawer, reminding us of the absence and invisibility of what laid there, and now is solidified on the surface. The viewer stands simultaneously with the work, and its creation.

Across these works, Beltran presents us with a study of that which is geological, and empathetic. In Landscape / Body / Screen paint strips and non-recyclables merge creating a work that looks something like the bisection of a landfill - a bisection that has been combed through and studied with a curious eye. What we leave behind is our history, and the history of our future ­­–Beltran lets us see it all at once. In this way these works can be thought of as mirrors, reflecting The Real and its impact, back to us.

Loriel Beltrán was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1985.

Beltrán’s work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Miami, FL; Museo de Arte Acarigua-Araure, Araure, Venezuela; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, among others.

He has presented solo exhibitions at the Bridge Tender House at The Wolfsonian – Florida International University, Miami Beach, FL; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL; Museum of Art and Design, Miami Dade College, Miami, FL; and Locust Projects, Miami, FL. Recently, his work was presented at “CENTRAL SOUNDS” at Luhring Augustine, Chelsea, New York; “There Is Always One Direction” at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami, FL. Beltrán held his first museum solo presentation at the Museum of Art and Design, Miami, FL (November 6, 2021 – May 1, 2022). He lives and works in Miami, FL.

Loriel Beltran was the recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium in 2015.

His works are part of the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art; Miami; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; de la Cruz Collection, Miami-Key Biscayne; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; etc.

Text by Hunter Osking, Loriel Beltran, Betty McGhee; and Diego Singh

Loriel Beltran would like to thank Fabian Leotteau for the conversations throughout the production of this body of work.

September 4th, October 10th, 2022

Opening Reception, September 4th, 6-8 pm.

CENTRAL FINE is happy to present Recovery a presentation by Georgia Sagri. What follows are excerpts and notes by Georgia Sagri :

Pain must be acknowledged to be followed: not as a neglected code, that for centuries has been demonised, but as a bell and a compass of the unique conditions of our actual internal states, behaviours, and affairs. When we listen through pain, there is the promise of change.

– Georgia Sagri

The exploration of performance lies at the center of Georgia Sagri’s work. The artist has developed a practice of care she terms IASI, in reference to the Greek word ίαση for recovery. This was born out of her need to prepare and recuperate from demanding performance pieces. IASI has since shifted into ongoing research on conditions like insomnia or fatigue, which Sagri calls “performance pathologies”. With IASI, the artist invites participants onto her Stage of Recovery, a bed-like frame upholstered with soft cushions, for individual sessions. Οn this stage, she guides participants through time-pacing, breathing, voice tuning, and self-developed motion techniques in which air is the main element.

Sagri methodically records these sessions as charcoal and coloured chalk drawings on paper, which she describes as “affective anatomies”. Dots, shapes, and converging lines indicate zones of tension, release, and the general feeling of a session towards recovery.

At CENTRAL FINE, these affective anatomies will float, letting air pass between them, anchored by weights, as ghosts that register something that marked us, and the presence of what changes.

« …No one talks about the present. There is one, and I feel it now with you. It is my only weapon. The present is that a group of friends are in a circle, here, and we are capable of doing anything we want, now. There is no convenience of belonging, only the presence of our bodies here and now, and the decision to do is the only thing we have… »

« …There is no minute left for discussion planning or explanation. It is clear that the urgency of us doing is more important than the articulation of definitions or meaning… »

Georgia Sagri has exhibited internationally in various solo and group exhibitions including: “Case L” at Friat Khunstalle, Fribourg; Mimosa House, London (2020), De Appel, Amsterdam; Portikus, Frankfurt/ Main, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2017, 2018); Cycladic Museum, Athens Greece (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2016); Sculpture Center, New York, USA (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2016, 2015); Forde, Geneva, Switzerland (2015); Kunsthalle Basel Switzerland (2014); MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2013); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2013); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2011); MoMA, New York, USA (2011); Macedonian Museum, Thessaloniki, Greece (2011); The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece (2006). Sagri has also participated in Documenta 14 (2017), Manifesta 11 (2016), Istanbul; Biennial (2015), Lyon Biennial (2013), Whitney Biennial (2012), Thessaloniki Biennial (2011), and Athens Biennial (2007). In 2014 Sagri initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE (hyle.gr) a semipublic/semiprivate space in the center of Athens, Greece.

Her first monograph catalogue was published by Sternberg Press, following her solo exhibitions Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri at Kunstverein Braunschweig, and Georgia Sagri and I at Portikus.

In the summer of 2019, she was offered the Tenure Position in the School of Fine Arts in Athens to organize and run the first Performance Art studio. She has published a book on her writings titled Stage of Recovery, in 2021, published by Divided Publishing Ltd; London. and Case_L, Friart Kunsthalle Fribourg

Sagri, Georgia : Stage of Recovery; Divided Publishing Ltd, London, 2021, Pp 30.

Sagri, Georgia : Stage of Recovery; Divided Publishing Ltd, London, 2021, Pp 30.

August 7th - September 1st 2022

Opening reception: August 7th 6-8 pm

Central Fine is pleased to present, Victory, the first exhibition in Miami Beach, Florida, of paintings by New York based artist, Frederic Tuten. The exhibition will feature six oil paintings on canvas and on panel, all made in 2022.

Tuten’s paintings are informed by color, lines, and its transformations; establishing dialectical engagements with each other. A text emerges from that conversation, pulled from the archive of days and the subconscious. The paintings are populated by hills, clouds, hats, faces, bottles, flowers, fences, bowls, non-representational shapes…everything. They could be thought of as receptacles of a multitude of associations, that somehow recall Frederic’s work as a novelist and screenplay writer (Tuten co-wrote the film Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, with the late Andrzej Żuławski).

A sense of being in a threshold where veils are pierced and free association takes over, charges Tuten’s work, both as a painter and writer, with a sense of urgency and unpredictability. A fierce calmness points to the angles where the unknown and joy merge; and what hinges in the void where beauty and the void coexist.

In Victory we access life’s prism, its beauty and loss. We see That Thing that hooks us, like a poem with endless variations, fractured by logic and re-arranged by the vividness of what lies within the units at play, which are activated by the gaps that intersect the relation of the unconscious, between reality and the subject.

What follows is Jerry Saltz review in New York Magazine of Tuten’s last show:

Frederic Tuten overflows with visionary scenes right out of a fecund and ungovernable imagination. Done in an awkward, assured, cartoonish hand with undertones of Arshile Gorky’s teeming amorphic graphic fields, this is pigment, shape, and scene as abstract language.

– Jerry Saltz

Text by Diego Singh, Miami, August 3rd, 2022, Miami Beach.

Frederic Tuten (b. 1936, Bronx, NY) is a celebrated fiction writer and visual artist. He studied at the Art Students League, City College of New York, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) prior to receiving a PhD in 19th-century American literature from New York University.

Over the course of Tuten’s long career, he has published five novels, including The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), and Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), both of which feature original cover art by Roy Lichtenstein; a memoir, My Young Life (2019) and in May 2022 a book of short stories, The Bar at Twilight.

Prior to his solo presentation: In the Fullness of Life (May 20, 2022) at Harper's New York City), he had two other solo exhibitions, Works on Cardboard (2021) at Harper’s, East Hampton, NY and Flowers, Plants, and Other Romances (2019) at Planthouse Gallery.

Tuten’s most recent book of stories with drawings, On a Terrace in Tangier – Works on Cardboard, just published by König Books/KMEC, is edited by Karen Marta, with a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Tuten, lives and works in New York City.

www.centralfine.com 1224-1226 Normandy Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, 33141. central@centralfine.com,

Tel: + 786-899-0977. Cell: 917-306-1218

August 7th, September 1st 2022

Opening reception: August 7th 6-8 pm

Hunter Osking’s debut solo exhibition, Boy Heaven, is an overlapping cinematic tale of hubris, pathos and alienation. Simulating the internet’s cacophony of information, Acts I, II and III play simultaneously in a multi-channel installation, accompanied by a single photograph authored by and depicting Osking’s subjects. Shot on a Sony VX2100, handy-cam and smartphone, the photograph and videos are replete with digital artifacts such as blur, shake and pixelation. Through scripted improvisations the unrefined elements give Boy Heaven its authentic affect, suspending disbelief and achieving an uncanny realism.

Chronologically the first act of Boy Heaven, Boy Heaven Episode 1.01 depicts a group of friends striving to create the next version of Jackass—pulling stunts ranging from juvenile to hazardous, ultimately culminating with the video’s central character, Travis, fatally jumping across a river on his dirt bike. Osking merges real life with art in the style of John Cassavetes, casting himself and his real life friends into caricatures of themselves and acquaintances: Brett Sidman’s real life inclination for death defying dirt bike stunts inspired his character, Travis Purvis, who’s invented last name is the actual surname of cast member Dylan Purvis, who plays Dylan, A.K.A. The Cookie Monster. Osking’s character is also an appropriation of himself: the implied camera man; he is both the fictional and real life auteur. Osking emulates Cassavetes’ celebrated coarse depiction of humanity; Travis pantses his girlfriend and calls her a bitch after pie-ing her in the face. Cookie Monster jokingly points a BB gun at his dog and eventually uploads the footage of Travis’s death to LiveLeak. The crassness is interpolated with moments of comradery and comedy, giving way to a compelling realism.

In keeping with Cassavetes’ method, Live Leak is a photo taken by Dylan Purvis on a night ride in his hometown of Newbury, FL. The location of the photo is just minutes up the river from where Travis crashes his dirt bike in Boy Heaven. The image both reflects the candid and juvenile energy of Boy Heaven Episode 1.01, while also alluding to Travis’ forthcoming death; an overexposed Brett, who plays Travis, renders the image into a biblical depiction of rapture.

Act II of Boy Heaven, Crime Scene Holographic depicts a balletic sweeping view of the aftermath of the dirt bike crash. Fragmentary glimpses of gore are illuminated by the presumed photographer’s flash, spawning a temporal division, ever-presently reminding viewers that Travis both will and has died. It is a specter haunting the viewer, and a parallel to the LiveLeak video that haunts Hunter.

In the third and central act, Hunter vlogs his attempt to reunite the gang and memorialize Travis on his birthday, just 8 months after his death. Named after a website dedicated to disarmingly heart wrenching eulogies for lost pets, Rainbow Bridge is a testament to the unexpected pathos one can find in the frays of the internet. As Hunter’s meandering spiel turns inward, his vlog grows more and more devastating. His juvenile anecdotes of “getting dome” and “all the crazy shit Travis did” are attempts to distance himself from the brink of his mournful state. Yet as he attempts to connect with his friends and repeatedly fails, the chipper facade begins to crack, climaxing at Travis’s ex girlfriend Leah’s house: Hunter is left to wander around alone, repeatedly calling out to his friends to no response, evoking in viewers the primal state of being abandoned as a child.

Hunter’s descent into solitude mirrors the relationship between spectacle and participant. As the leaked video is abstracted and degraded at accelerating velocities, the spectacle overtakes him with an overwhelming grief, compounded by the loss of his friend and the responsibility he feels for having authored the footage, Hunter proverbially stands “too close to the fire.” It is only after he stops vlogging that we learn he and his friends do connect in a night of watching Travis videos.

In all of the darkness there is a sense of hope - speaking to his Youtube audience at the scene of the accident, Hunter condemns Cookie Monster for the leaked video, and correctly asserts that it distorts the event, that there is more to human life than what the spectacle presents us. In a moment of inspired passion he claims that when he saw Travis’s crash in real life he “didn't see a man that just hit the jump and died” he “saw a man who was having fun” he “saw a man who just did the biggest jump of his goddamn life. Let's keep the party going.”

Text by Betty McGhee

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1 Osking’s improvisational style was inspired by directors Mike Leigh and Sean Baker

2 Levich, Jacob. “John Cassavetes: An American Maverick.” Cinéaste 20, no. 2 (1993): 51. “He chose instead to create a cinema of gaucherie, relentlessly baiting viewers by depicting human beings not at their worst—that would have been easy—but at their coarsest…His style, in art as in life, was always confrontational, passionate, and rude;”

3 LiveLeak was a British website best known for hosting submitted footage of extreme violence and gore. The website came to prominence in 2007 following the filming and leaking of the execution of Saddam Hussein.

4 Osking’s self-caricature owes credit to director Paul Schrader’s recurring depiction of loneliness.

5 Debord, Guy. 1992. Society of the Spectacle. London, England: Rebel Press, London. In his seminal text, Guy Debord identifies the spectacle as “a social relation among people, mediated by images,” stating “The alienation of the spectator to the …contemplated object is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires…This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”

6. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” E-Flux Issue #10 (November 2009)

7Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. Penguin Great Ideas. Harlow, England: Penguin Books. “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art-its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence-and nothing else-that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.”

Boy Heaven: Credits

Directed by Hunter Osking

Written by Hunter Osking & Betty McGhee

Produced by Betty McGhee, Brett Sidman, & Dylan Purvis

Live Leak photo taken by Dylan Purvis

Performed by Hunter Osking, Brett Sidman, Paul Baker, Dylan Purvis, Dakota the Dog, Betty McGhee, Cole Zelznak, Buster the Dog & Puppy the Dog

Production Design by Brett Sidman, Dylan Purvis, Sienna Takabe, & Lucy Gaehring

Photography Print by Glady Alroy

Photography Consulting by Roe Ethridge

Installation by Eric Voorhis and Sannidhi Shukla

JULY 10TH - AUGUST 3RD 2022

OPENING: JULY 10TH, 6-8 PM

Zelmira Rizo-Patrón’s work investigates the environments or ‘bodies’ we inhabit and interact with. Working across drawing, painting and printmaking, she searches to unpack and explore how our relationships to these layered spaces can affect or define our perception, thought and feeling.

Her interest in printmaking lies not in its ability to replicate, but rather in its capacity to create variation and build a layered or moving sense of time and space1. By juxtaposing what she calls ‘variable prints’ (of drawings and paintings) she establishes idiosyncratic relationships within the work that could parallel the constantly evolving life of a thought or feeling, of an experience and its memory, of a dream and its recollection.

This perspective is applied both practically and conceptually in her work: personal and intimate encounters or dialogues (with self and others) are captured through quick impulses of drawing and painting. These are then mapped or layered into the fabric of a larger space, time, or discourse.

Rizo-Patron’s work could be seen as a consideration of the roles that institutions such as language, and other structures play on bodies, suffocating them, censoring them, or conversely, liberating and empowering them. By rendering the very structure of language and the architecture of its power illegible, Zelmira opens spaces of interrogation and play, through a vantage point that approaches the poetic, bypassing the very limits and impositions that decapitate us daily.

Zelmira Rizo-Patrón was born in 1995 in Miami and is of Peruvian descent. She has a BA from Cornell University in comparative literature with a concentration in architecture. This is her first individual presentation.

1. Rizo-Patron’s interest in time as a productive force for meaning, recalls Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in which the fictional character Pierre Menard, writes in the 20th Century, a line for line reproduction of Don Quixote. This short story, published in 1939, presents time as a cumulative force, which charges the contextual meaning of the original work; therefore, producing, as we see in Zelmira’s work, an-other type of body (of work).

June 5th- July 6th, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, JUNE 5TH 6-8.30 PM

Bananas haven’t always taken their current form. Trace their ancestors back a few hundred years and you’ll find fruits that were smaller, more rotund, and less edible. It was only through the push and pull symbiotic process of human domestication that bananas transformed into their modern shape. The trajectory of the banana is not dissimilar to the trajectory of a portrait.

A portrait is something of a blind psychic handshake between the painter and their subject, where the conscious and subconscious desires of both parties find themselves as present in the final painting as the image of the subject itself. In Banana Ester & Petrichor, Aramis Gutierrez explores this inherent subjectivity, creating narratives that work as statements on the nature of friendship, grief, beauty, and sadness.

We can see his interest in deconstructing the subjectivity of portraiture in Willy Splishy Splashy, a painting showing Gutierrez’s friend Willy, posing nude in a Miami pool. Willy’s legs are spread delicately, with one resting in the water, and the other pushed upwards to the sky, in an almost balletic gesture. The moment depicted is flattering and joyous but is represented with a sly nuance - upon close inspection another aspect of the moment reveals itself - at the edge of the canvas an assistant’s hand can be seen lifting Willy’s leg, presumably to maintain his striking pose.

Gutierrez’s choice to paint the artifice of the moment directly onto the canvas reveals the staged nature of the portrait in a manner recalling the conceptual framework of Epic Theater1 : We are looking at that portrait’s construction. We become alienated from the classical narrative of the portrait, and, perhaps, consider Willy not just as an immortal, majestic being, but also as a human, full of joy, humor, and pain. This disarming honesty works its way through every painting in the series.

Gutierrez reminds us of the constructed nature of these portraits, whether it be through his highly stylized cinematic lighting, his unabashed commitment to capturing the dark, lurid aesthetic of South Florida, or through his unusually ‘relaxed’ mise en scène

It is sometimes said that portraits are possessed objects - that every portrait ever painted is haunted by time, by history, by the subject of the portrait itself. While that is certainly true of the works in Banana Ester & Petrichor; they are also haunted by something much more personal and localized - that thing that resides beneath the peel of the banana.

Aramis Gutierrez, b. Pittusburgh, PA, 1975. He has presented his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; Orlando Museum of Art; The Frost Museum, Miami, FL; Miami Museum of Art, Miami FL; Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY; Guccivuitton, NADA Miami Beach, FL; among other places.

He was awarded the South Florida Cultural Consortium Award; Kaleidoscope Magazine Instagram Residency, 2015; The Deering Estate Invitational Studio Residency Program among other distinctions.

Gutierrez cofounded the artist run space GUCCIVUITTON with artists Loriel Beltran and Domingo Castillo, later partnering with architect/designer, Jonathan Gonzalez.

His work is part of the Collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, among others.

Text by Hunter Osking

Edits by Diego Singh

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1 Epic Theatre, German Episches Theater, is a form of didactic drama presenting a series of loosely connected scenes that avoid illusion and often interrupt the story line to address the audience directly with analysis, argument, or documentation. Epic theatre is now most often associated with the dramatic theory and practice evolved by the playwright-director Bertolt Brecht in Germany from the 1920s onward. Its dramatic antecedents include the episodic structure and didactic nature of the pre-Expressionist drama of the German playwright Frank Wedekind and the Expressionist theatre of the German directors Erwin Piscator (with whom Brecht collaborated in 1927) and Leopold Jessner, both of whom made exuberant use of the technical effects that came to characterize epic theatre.

APRIL 16TH-MAY 22nd

Spirits are threaded through Myrlande Constant’s work just as tautly as her beads. This tautness serves to create something of an optical illusion. Up close we can trace their paths with our fingers, but from afar, they blur into texture. Her work is intricately tangled, and purposefully so, the spirits are like the beads, we aren’t supposed to be able to pull them from the work with our hands. If we could separate the spirits from the works, the works would lose their essence. Her flags are created in the tradition of vodou-drapo, they are meant to draw in spirits.

Myrlande Constant’s flags aren’t traditional, they push as much as they pull. Traditional weaving techniques are employed as often as techniques borrowed from Haute Couture. Historical figures are just as present as pop culture references. Spirits are just as likely to be adorned with ancient ceremonial objects, as they are to be holding handbags

But what most crucially differentiates Myrlande’s flags from traditional vodou flags are the reasons under which they are created. They haven’t been created in the name of ceremony, they’ve been created in the name of art. This transference of purpose creates a tension in the modern gallery space: A tension between the world of the secular and the world of the spiritual.

If we follow this tension to its logical end, we are posed with many questions: What does it mean when ceremonial art is removed from the ceremony? What happens to the spirits drawn to the work? Where do they go? (These questions aren’t as elusive as they might sound, one can find their answers when seeing the works in person.)

Today our entire lives are mediated through digital simulacra, and, to demand one’s physical presence is a radical (and necessary) act. It can be easy to forget that - much like Myrlande’s work - the gallery space is a descendant of the spiritual practices of our ancestors. Thomas McEvilley writes that the earliest historical analogue of the gallery is the Egyptian tomb, a space sealed off from the outside world that puts its visitors in contact with eternity. This is what is so exciting about Myrlande Constant’s work, her flags re-center the eternal in a space that has been desperately in need of it. She turns the gallery back into the temple - and she does so without anachronism: Sexual scenes meet political actions, agriculture, syncretism, and racial tensions.

Through her work Myrlande Constant does the impossible - she creates spiritual spaces that are comprehensible in the modern world. She works with the tools gifted to her by time (her liberated femininity, her sewing techniques, her historical perspective) and uses them to subvert the form, and through this subversion she creates flags that can sit inside our time while rubbing against its edges. In their presence we are humbled by the beauty of their texture, by the weight of their history, by the depth of their calling. When we are looking at them it becomes obvious that we are not staring by ourselves, we are staring alongside the spirits in the room with us.

Myrlande Constant has exhibited her work at the El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince; Pioneer Works, New York; CENTRAL FINE Miami Beach; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the Fowler Museum, California; Le Grand Palais, France; Luhring Augustine, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; among other places.

Her work will be included in La Biennale di Venezia “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani, in April 2022.

1. Voudo-drapo are ceremonial flags used in haitain spiritual rituals as a way to draw in spirits. Interestingly, this intended function dictates their form, the use of beads and sequins are no accident, their shiny luster is purposefully employed as a means to attract spirits.

Text by Hunter Osking

Curated by Tomm El-Saieh

March 13th-April 11th, 2022.

Opening reception: Sunday March 13th, 5-7 PM.

A frame that dilates and contracts itself, behaves like an eye zooming into the tensions revealed by free association; undressed by the subconscious.

Zephirin’s paintings show a reality that commemorates and remains at odds with itself. A deity becomes a giraffe, a zebra and a fish. A war scene converges with a chorus in ecstasy, and an orgy emerges from two humanoid faces built by leaves. In Frantz Zephirin work’s, rhythm seems to indicate the undulation of meaning beyond the parameters of logic. Dreams and offerings merge, and a retelling of tradition and invention are told by the mind of a painter, that is also, a voodoo priest. His work often depicts The Invisible Ones (The Loas) mutating into animals, plants and humans. This decision signals a profound change in the re-presentation of voodoo deities. Unlike Andre Pierre and many of his followers, (who gave faces to the representation of voodoo deities with their specific syncretic actions and attributes), Zephirin’s figures transcend those attributes, and are seen in a state of becoming. We witness an expansion of the religious into the realm of art, moving beyond the space of illustration, venturing into the tension of the transformative and the reality of initiations.

Borders appear insistently in the work of Frantz Zephirin. At times, they are visible or implied when transformation takes over, and porosity becomes the focus and the context. Zephirin’s work problematizes borders as often as it defines them. This can be seen in his work Ati-Solé Le Dieu Soleil et Des Eclyses. Here we see him painting past his subject, past the canvas, and directly onto the actual wooden frame. The border between the canvas and the wood becomes irrelevant, pushing the works' spiritual content to the forefront. This dissolution of borders allows one to follow the piece as one would follow a path along a Moebius strip—borders become recentered in the work as soon as the content of the piece comes back into focus. In this plane of simultaneity colonizers are met by Voodoo deities in a series of symbolic mergings/confrontations that feed off each other, structuring what seems chaotic into a mise-en-scène defined by the effort to address the complexity of Haiti’s reality, through the creative effort.

In her writing on the Spiralist movement, Kaiama L. Glover writes that, “The Spiralists highlight the possibilities for un-mediated connections between the individual and the universe - connections that in many ways transcend the at-times limiting boundaries of national and, even, regional identity.” Spiralism finds solace in contradictions and connections, in its creation of cycles that feed back and forth into one another: from identity, to spirituality, and back.

It’s clear, then, why Zephirin’s work is often considered part of the Spiralist tradition. Layers of realms stack upon one another: the sky, the ocean, the earth, the living, and the dead. His work’s porosity is focused on dissolution and redefinition. Borders are reconsidered, while an impossibility is revealed: The impossibility that lies beneath any attempt made to flatten complex systems of meaning and cohabitation.

Frantz Zephirin b.1968, Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Zephirin was awarded the Gold Medal in the Third Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting sponsored by The Museum of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic. His work was included in the V Biennial in Cuenca, Ecuador; the El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among other venues.

His paintings will be included la Biennale di Venezia’s “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani; 2022. A solo presentation of his work will open on March 2022, at the Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; curated by Tomm El-Saieh.

Text by Tomm El-Saieh, Viktor El-Saieh, Hunter Osking, and Diego Singh

Spiralism is a Haitain literary movement that emerged in the mid-sixties. Frankétienne described Spiralism as “life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connections (positionings in space and time). Not in a closed circuit, but tracing the path of a spiral.”

“JEN”. January 9th-February 16th, 2022

CENTRAL FINE presents "JEN", Jen DeNike's first individual presentation at the gallery. The presentation includes photographs and an installation that creates a visual choreography.

On February 6th, at 6 PM, we will present 9, a new performance ballet by Jen DeNike, created in collaboration with choreographer and principal dancer of the Miami City Ballet, Rainer Krenstetter. 9 follows 'Scrying" a ballet created by DeNike and presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MoMA) and later, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. Please RSVP - space is limited.

A ballet in 3 Acts:

9 photographic works

81 tires

6 dancers

Act 1.- Interiors

The entrance.

in between spaces invoked

no horizon

gold reflector, reflect

a bowl remains

Act 2.- Greenhouse

The greenhouse growth lab is a limbo, each photograph is a pod.

I’m growing men. Suddenly there’s no gender.

Invasion of the body snatchers.

Ecosystem and Fluidity

Amnesia

The biogenesis of JEN as a framework

grafting the pre-Raphaelite urgency to approach nature, erase genre painting,

a greenhouse revolting from the revolt to the revolt.

Suspension of nature, suspended mortality, science fiction.

Possession

Act 3.- The impossibility of Writing Fiction Today

A fallen monument built by tires, has collapsed (not destroyed)

A para monument and the politics of memory.

Geography of the body, consumption, tires, dismantle a gesture, a movement.

Creative structure, mobilization, mapping.

Historically a revolution begins with destruction, structural and transient revolutions, ruined.

Choreographed revolution, the monolith is capricious and destructive, circling

Dissent, Dissonance, Dementia.

The nines keep appearing.

CENTRAL FINE will present 9, a new performance ballet by Jen DeNike in collaboration with choreographer and principal dancer of Miami City Ballet Rainer Krenstetter. on February 6, 2022 at 5 pm Please RSVP - space is limited.

Jen DeNike’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; ; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; MoMA PS1; The Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Participant Inc; 54th Venice Biennale; Garage Projects, Moscow; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; MOCA Toronto; MACRO ROMA; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; The Bronx Museum, New York; Miami Light Projects; Red Line Contemporary Art Center, Denver; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-On-Hudson; MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Torino; Schauspiel Köln Opera House; Art Basel Miami Art Public; Art Basel Miami Film Sector; and at the Wallis Annenberg Center For the Performing Arts, Los Angeles.

Selected commissioned projects include Bombay Beach Biennale, EMPAC, LAND Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Creative Time; Performa Biennial and Faena Art. This is Jen DeNike’s first presentation at CENTRAL FINE.

Her work is held in the permanent public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin-Düsseldorf; among others

November 28th-January 4th 2022

In Spell, Constanza Schaffner’s second solo exhibition at Central Fine, Painting becomes an oblique journal, which is both a celebration and a critique of the medium per-se. In Schaffner’s practice the poetic effort dictates the spelling, the spell, and the spiel ('game' in German), proposing an expressive urgency that expands itself, beyond the amalgamation of sounds and terms.

Schaffner’s works create incisive fantasies, while addressing Painting’s capacity to observe its own performativity ­­­–defined by the thickness of painted flesh and its tendency towards ‘abstraction.’ In her paintings each pore becomes, either, an isolated brushstroke or a code, while searching for the space where the reverberations of life intersect the body. In a work titled Mi Soleado Rincón, flowers sprout from a bald head which, in turn, emerges from a cubic shape where a face is amplified, as if projected onto that form. The element of surprise carries, within, horror and beauty, creating an uncanny universe populated by playful allusions to pulp literature, or B cinema, as well as by Painting/Narcissism’s capacity to engulf the other in its voracious appetite for attention.

In the act of gazing inwards to paint, Schaffner’s approach to Painting was influenced by Chantal Ackerman’s methodology of using herself as material for her films, in works such as Saute ma Ville or Je Tu Il Elle. Like Ackerman, Schaffner seems fascinated and horrified when representing/liberating/examining the self. Alguien Tiembla shows the artist’s skin magnified to the point where it seems inhabited by what looks like mold, random patterns, and growths. The pose reminds us of the artist framing herself, as Madonna did in Vogue. The painting shows Schaffner touching herself, shocked at her own vibration, pondering whether the image/herself exists somewhere between life and death. Like in a scene out of a vampire movie, at the moment when the sun hits the creature, we see Schaffner becoming gold dust, spelling out her finitude.

Schaffner’s paintings demand attention, not only in their scale, larger than herself, but also in that they boldly embody the empowering enthusiasm of great ideas, while remaining deeply personal, and intimate. The exposure to life, as a harsh light, shapes these paintings as theoretical and sensual archives, which, like poems, allow for the other’s involvement in their inherent mystery.

Constanza Schaffner was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1989. Her work has been recently included in group presentations at Bortolami Gallery, New York; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Park View, Los Angeles; and Galerie Houssenot, Paris. Her paintings are included in the collections of the Hall Art Foundation, Germany-USA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

October 24th-November 24th, 2021. Opening: October 24th 5-7 pm.

The title of this presentation, might allude to everything: The enigma of art, of violence, of behaviors, of the subconscious, etc. We know that when antagonistic forces intersect the body, pain reveals a type of speech that arises from oppression. In Chemu Ng’ok’s work there’s a dialectical engagement with power through an internal source that acts and responds to the frictions that aim to subjugate it. When re-presenting oppression, it is possible to extract the material that becomes productive despite the calcification of trauma, through an exegesis of brushstrokes, lines, lines of thoughts, etc. What follows, are notes written by Chemu Ng’ok.

Psychological Riot

In the Psychological Riot I am rioting against the patriarchal and racist system I find myself in, as a Black woman, while working towards my own liberation in society. For instance, by proposing that the Psychological Riot happens in the psyche, I can approach an examination of the ways in which systemic violence occurs: It can exhibit itself in the body, but at the same time be hidden. And, it is both personal and communal. By making the Psychological Riot tangible, it’s easier to disarm the mechanisms of systemic violence, through my prism of the world.

The riot that I speak of happens in the psyche. It differs from the notion of protest, but it can contribute to an understanding of protest, as it delves into the possible mental machinations of a protestor before they decide to protest. The Psychological Riot is ambiguous. It provides a fertile ground for different interpretations and theories, which include black feminism, revolution, protest, blackness, existentialism, the body, and the theory of affect.

One way in which I present the Psychological Riot is within the representation of the psyche as a world constructed by Painting. In this painterly world, the psyche is black oil paint. The constituents of this paint are hues of burnt umber and phthalo blue, with touches of green and sometimes speckles of red. And although the black paint itself is oil, it represents a void with endless possibilities. However, for the purpose of clarity I focus on two types of psyches. One psyche is the painterly psyche, and the other is that of the ‘collective unconscious’. The former is painterly, and it can zoom into the personal, but can also integrate into the latter, which exists as a public and communal psyche; constantly interrogated by systems such as colonialism and imperialism.

In painting the body, I show a psychological disjuncture. The flexibility of flesh offers me painterly ammunition. Lines hint at the unfinished aspects of thought…There is an anxiety depicted by the growths of a head. Imagine the distress one feels in a dream/fantasy of many heads growing out of one’s neck; the sheer psychological horror of being left alone in the dark with many heads on one’s body.

But then again in another moment, the lines morph and become a type of coding that hovers in “the air” of Painting. These transmutations are endless They refer to language, memory, ritual, absence, a future that is yet to be determined, things left unsaid, and bodies on the verge of eruption.

Chemu Ng'ok (b. Nairobi, Kenya) completed her MFA in Painting at Rhodes University (2017) and is a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Visual and Performing Arts of Africa Masters Bursary (2016).

Solo presentations include her MFA thesis show, Riot (2017); her graduate solo exhibition Social Revolution (2014); and a solo booth at the FNB Joburg Art Fair titled Self Esteem for Girls (2017).

In 2018, Ng’ok was included in the New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Other group exhibitions include Speaking back at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); LUSH, Smac Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa (2015); Surface Tension at the GUS Gallery, Stellenbosch (2016); My Kind of Protest at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (2019), “ Aletheia , “ at CENTRAL FINE (2021).

Ng’ok was an artist resident at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL in collaboration with the Africa Centre, Capetown, South Africa (2019). An Enigma is Chemu Ng’ok first solo exhibition in the United States, and at CENTRAL FINE.

Chemu Ng’ok in Arial italics. Diego Singh in Arial normal Nairobi-Miami Beach (2017-2021)

Myrlande Constant, José Delgado Zuñiga, Chemu Ng’ok, Georgia Sagri, Constanza Schaffner, Diego Singh, Kyle Thurman

September 25 – October 19, 2021

Disclosure: This presentation does not address the concept of Aletheia(1 ) as truth per-se, but rather as an unveiling of something that appears once filters, language, and voices are allowed to voice the ID.

Clashes are to be expected.

With every space, the calligram (2) announces a sense of pause and a threshold.

As one unzipped something, what was unveiled remained, inevitably, in flux. What was revealed wasn’t the material or the object (naked now), but rather, the tension.

Myrlande Constant’s works could be seen as offerings or incantations, re-linking the realm of the invisible ones (The Mysteries or Loas) and this plane. In representing the Loas, she opens a series of relationships that affect reality. Her works are both sacred and secular objects, and when positioned in certain spaces, they act as offerings or portals or spells that (according to Myrlande’s beliefs) can resonate with reality, opening channels for the spiritual to bless, access, possess, or even affect a space.

In Myrlande’s work, the merging of the religious, political, and sexual, offers a new type of “visibility” that establishes a set of certainties that lies beyond what remains empirically verifiable and stays profoundly rooted in the subjective. Constant’s work redefines the religious artifact (a Voodoo flag) by incorporating sexuality, feminist theory, race, and the quotidian into the plane of the sacred. The point of intersection is where Aletheia, or an unveiling, takes place.

Georgia Sagri’s work approaches the forces that mark a body, a body of work, institutions, the planet, etc, and their relationships. These relationships generate an arch that is constantly being crossed, acted upon, which, in turn, reveals the dynamics that remain in the terrain of the symptomatic, both in the body and in society. Through various mediums such as, poetry, video, painting, sculpture, drawings, performance, or one on one sessions that engage with the other as a participant; through writing or organizing political activities; Sagri constantly opens her practice, engaging in a Rimbaudian way, with the infrastructures of language/body/action and their potential to produce change, to resist the dichotomies that aim at division, levels, categories.

The works presented in Aletheia are part of Sagri’s ongoing project, ίαση (pron. iasi), which refers to the time and process by which a body changes through illness. Language and its impact on the body, and its resonances, puncture and embrace what remains mobile, invisible, and elusive. This force, which is often perceived in poetry, marks Sagri’s approach to presences —addressing bodies in conflict, bodies healing, bodies of words, and their internal/external reverberations.

José Delgado Zuñiga’s practice accesses the space were politics and dreams shake each other up. His paintings question traditional genres (such as Mexican Muralism or Surrealism) by engaging with subjective, private experiences, rather than the universal propositions or scenarios that were almost exclusively addressed by these movements. Each drawing in Aletheia suggests circumstances that unearth aspects of what’s taboo, violent, or politicized by appealing to a sense of drama and humor that charges the facade of his work, and its always evolving surface, with pathos.

The works in Aletheia accumulate concepts and influences, and pile them up like sounds and bodies often found in a mass grave of white noise. Zuñiga’s works evoke a bombardment of love and loss, hope and its musicality, all joined by an artist set on observing dialectical relationships.

Constanza Schaffner’s self-portraits show the figure right at a moment of transformation—evoking another kind of truth, a truth that goes beyond correspondence with notions of reality.

In her work, we can see the concept of transformation, where a poetic presence bypasses the limitations deposited on perception, or people, and especially on women, by the establishment.

Her training in philosophy and comparative literature informs her praxis, which draws influences from Magical Realism, mythology, literature, or cinema; presenting confrontational and direct openings to self-reflection; reconsidering painting as a field, punctuated by the complexity inherent in human interaction, art history, or, Painting’s relationship with other mediums (poetry, theater philosophy. Etc.-). Schaffner’s approach to Painting actively defies the optimization of texts/surfaces, making contact with the ‘negativity’ attributed to whatever escapes a censorship that insists on flattening and eliminating subjectivities.

In his work, Diego Singh (who’s writing this text in the third person, by the way) draws a Borromean knot that allows him to enter and exit the notion of identity as an abstraction and a construct, while observing embarrassment, as a disguise for the traumatic: One is veiled and exposed.

“Embarrassing” things, like Martha Stewart’s catalogue of craft tools, are used to compose large-scale paintings that oscillate between Minimalism, Modernism, glam rock, and gore. Or an incrusted pearl, and a souvenir from the tourism industry, show up on precariously made sculptures or a painting: The foreign body crashes the parties. An identity is always at stake. It unravels and frees itself of the imperiousness of certainties, of style and its boundaries. A head becomes a gun, a bowling ball, or a place to insert fingers. A painting or a sculpture becomes a press release, a gallery, a self-portrait. Repression, oppression, and liberation are coded in Singh’s works —something is concealed, passing by, participating in another knot of associations, always in the process of burying or pulling out, one thing or another.

Kyle Thurman’s work presents the body as a territory where demands, identity politics, jobs, and art history meet on the skin of the subjects. His work shows states of emotional vulnerability/openness, which can sometimes morph into translucent and vibrantly monstrous shapes. What Thurman conveys is the act of undressing the apparent by providing access to social and psychological tensions, which in turn, charge the portraits/self-portraits with the force of a million possibilities (ranging from a performative self-awareness to the liberation of a libidinal energy that mutates into the unpredictable). Thurman mentions that a type of presence, that manifests itself through pigment, appears in these works, hovering over them…It could be a materiality that rests, colors, and up to a certain point, defines the subjects. This undefined presence, both a skin or a cloud, coats the works in full ambiguity and possibility.

Chemu Ng’ok’s work presents power dynamics observed as a set of enigmatic strategies. Chess figures, armies, groups of people, the law, soldiers, and the weight of oppression seem to permeate her practice in ways that are both urgent and lyrical. In her works, dialectical relationships are always at play, zooming into the frailty of human experience in contrast with institutions and their pressure. What Ng’ok paints is ‘said’ at once with potency and tenderness, pulsating with the tempo and the echoes of what’s intimate, in a stark encounter with the weight of internal and external agents of trauma.

© Diego Singh

Miami Beach, July–September 2021

Ed. Zelmira Rizo-Patrón

About the artists

Myrlande Constant (b. Port-au-Prince, Haiti) has exhibited her work at Pioneer Works, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Le Grand Palais, Paris; Brown University, Providence; Luhring Augustine, New York; David Lewis Gallery, New York; Faena Art Foundation, Miami; El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince; and CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; among other institutions and galleries.

She will present an upcoming a solo project with Luhring Augustine, New York at the ADAA curated by Tomm El-Saieh, as well as an upcoming solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach (2022). A survey of Constant’s work, curated by Katherine Smith, will take place at the Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles in 2023.

Constant’s work can be found in the following permanent collections: the Fowler Museum, UCLA; Pérez Art Museum (PAMM); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others.

José Delgado Zuñiga (b. Ventura, California) completed his MFA in Painting at Columbia University, New York (2017), where he was also an adjunct professor in painting and drawing (2017–2019).

Zuñiga has presented his work at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, CT; Columbia University, NY; among other institutions and galleries. His awards and recognitions include Lead Teaching Artist and Muralist at Groundswell, Brooklyn, New York (2017–2020); the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Grant (both, 2018). He presented his first solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach in 2019, followed by his second solo exhibition at the gallery, in February 2021.

Zuñiga’s work is now part of the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Chemu Ng'ok (b. Nairobi, Kenya) completed her MFA in Painting at Rhodes University (2017) and is a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Visual and Performing Arts of Africa Masters Bursary (2016).

Solo presentations include her masters show, Riot (2017); her graduate solo exhibition Social Revolution (2014); and a solo booth at the FNB Joburg Art Fair titled Self Esteem for Girls (2017).

In 2018, Ng’ok was included in the New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Other group exhibitions include Speaking back at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); LUSH, Smac Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa (2015); Surface Tension at the GUS Gallery, Stellenbosch (2016); My Kind of Protest at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (2019).

Ng’ok was an artist resident at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL in collaboration with the Africa Centre, Capetown, South Africa (2019). Ng’ok will present her first solo exhibition in the United States at CENTRAL FINE, in October 2021.

Georgia Sagri (b. Athens, Greece) studied music and cello at the National Music School of Athens, holds a BFA from The Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens (2002) and an MFA from Columbia University, New York (2008).

She has exhibited internationally in various solo and group exhibitions: de Appel, Amsterdam; Mimosa House, London; Tavros, Athens; Portikus, Frankfurt/ Main, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2017, 2018); Cycladic Museum, Athens (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2016); Sculpture Center, New York (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016, 2015); Forde, Geneva (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2013); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2011); MoMA, New York (2011); The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2006).

Sagri has also participated in documenta 14 (2017), Manifesta 11 (2016), Istanbul Biennial (2015), Lyon Biennial (2013), Whitney Biennial (2012), Thessaloniki Biennial (2011), and Athens Biennial (2007). In 2014 Sagri initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE (hyle.gr) a semipublic/semiprivate space in the center of Athens, Greece. Her first monograph catalogue was published by Sternberg Press following her solo exhibitions Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri at Kunstverein Braunschweig, and Georgia Sagri and I at Portikus, Frankfurt.

In the summer of 2019, Sagri was offered a Tenure Position in the School of Fine Arts in Athens to organize and run their first Performance Art studio.

Her awards include Ettore e Ines Fico Award, Museo Ettore Fico, Torino, Italy (2018), the Artadia Award (Excellence), New York, US (2015); Joan Sovern Sculpture Award (1st year MFA Columbia University), New York, US (2007); Spyropoulos Foundation, 2nd Award, Athens, Greece (2005); 2nd Deste Foundation Award, 1st Prize, Performance, In the Shop Window, Athens, Greece (2001).

Sagri has recently published Stage of Recovery with Divided Publishing, Brussels; a book compiling texts that range from political activism to poetry, she will hold an upcoming solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE in 2022.

Constanza Schaffner (b. Buenos Aires, Argentina) won a MacCracken Fellowship, New York University (2013-2018) and is a PHD candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature, New York University. Advisor: Boris Groys.

Schaffner has presented her work at Plymouth Rock, Zurich; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Park View, Los Angeles, Galerie Houssenot, Paris.

Schaffner’s work is included in the Hall Collection.

She will present her second solo show at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach in November 2021.

Diego Singh (b. Salta, Argentina) studied Social Communications and was a research assistant at the National Council for Technological and Scientific Investigation (CONICET), as part of the investigation team of Graciela Maturo, PhD. His research while at the CONICET focused on surrealist poetry from Argentina during the 1940s.

Singh has presented his work internationally in various venues including The American University Museum, Washington, DC; Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Fondazzione Malvina Menegaz, Castelbasso; Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno; Galleria Macca, Sardegna; Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami, among others.

His work is in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum (PAMM); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the de la Cruz Collection, among others.

Singh is the founder of CENTRAL FINE and has served as a regional advisor for the Future Generation Prize, granted by the Pinchuk Foundation since 2014. He has published various texts on artists, most recently on the work of Georgia Sagri, in Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri published by Sternberg Press; and upcoming, a text on the work of Jen DeNike, published by FELD+HAUS Publishing, and signs and symbols. He will hold upcoming solo presentations at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, Galleria Macca and a Residency at Fondazione MACC, Sardegna.

Kyle Thurman (b. West Chester, Philadelphia) received his BA in Film Studies and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2009. He later studied as a guest student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the classes of Christopher Williams and Peter Doig (2011–2012) and completed his MFA in painting at Bard College (2016).

Thurman has presented his work at the Whitney Biennial 2019; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; David Lewis gallery, New York; Platform New York, (David Lewis in collaboration with David Zwirner); Sophie Tappheiner, Vienna; Planet Eart LLC (dual show with Hadi Fallahpisheh), among others.

He has participated in group shows at 1301PE, Los Angeles; ‘FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial’, Cleveland; Off Vendome, New York (US); Hanna Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Cookie Butcher, Antwerp; Clifton Benevento, New York (US); MOCA Tuscon; and The de la Cruz Collection (currently on view), among others.

Thurman’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio.

Thurman will present his second solo show at David Lewis gallery, New York in 2022; and a third solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach in October 2022.

Notes:

(1) Aletheia: (Ancient Greek: ἀλήθεια) is truth or disclosure in philosophy.

In the early to mid-20th-century, Martin Heidegger brought renewed attention to the concept of aletheia, by relating it to the notion of disclosure, or the way in which things appear as entities in the world. While he initially referred to aletheia as "truth", specifically a form that is pre-Socratic origin, Heidegger eventually corrected this interpretation, writing: “To raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth." Heidegger revised his views on aletheia as truth, after nearly forty years, in the essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in On Time and Being.

( 2) Calligram (noun)—a word or piece of text in which the design and layout of the letters creates a visual image related to the meaning of the words themselves. In the current presentation, the spacing after quotation marks, before the word Aletheia, the space before the coma, and the space between the coma and the quotation marks signal the flexibility of the hinge, the opening, and the pause before the next term, and so forth.

Viktor El-Saieh. KONBIT

April 25th-May 30th 2020.

Deye Mon, Gen Mon (Beyond Mountains, There are Mountains)

Deye Konbit, Gen Konbit(Beyond Konbit, There is Konbit) 

In Viktor El-Saieh’s third solo presentation at the gallery, issues of collaborative enterprise encounter conflict, the cancer of hope, and the complexity of systems. His practice is set in reformulating a way of addressing painting as a means of understanding time and life, through the very system (Painting) that holds within all sorts of emergences and collapses. El-Saieh’s stylized figurative works bring to mind naïve art, Haitian painting, the concept of the dragon vein[I] in Chinese landscape compositions; among many other associations. And as the artist mentions: “Beyond collaboration,there is collaboration”. Beyond voices there are legions. 

Konbit -the title of this presentation- can be understood, conceptually, as acollaborative enterprise. "A thing which can only be done collectively. A phenomenon which proposes the idea that the individual is both necessary and invisible. In this same vein, my work can be understood as the product of a decades long conversation which is both generational in scope, and collaborative in its approach". 

Konbit, in this show, is also related-at least phonetically- to combat…which is a collaboration of sorts, a tension, something that is defined by violence. These paintings then, are not utopic representations, but rather, seem packed with conflicting decisions: Animals anthropomorphized, religion and industry represented together; or labor...And people vacationing next to a waterfall (that actually is located in Haiti where ceremonies, historically take place) while a soldier moves forward against a purple-black lion with shoes…Collaboration, ritual, association, its beauty, its promise, its taboo, and its violence. 

In some of the paintings shown, a grid, which can be thought of as a chess board, appears as a background, a foreground, and a pattern. In fact, El-Saieh points out: "The gridded tiles of the bottom floor studio of Galerie Issa in Port-Au-Prince is the default setting of my practice and finds its way into my work often. It’s the starting point from which I lived, (within the shade of a collective enterprise) and the basis of my bias in favor of an arrangement which is collective in nature.”

Many of these paintings show Viktor El-Saieh’s experience as a Haitian immigrant, a worker, a community organizer, a teacher, or a farmer, etc. They are Informed by Viktor’s "Coming of age in the era of globalization, where the internet offers individuals the opportunity to be in many places simultaneously (while being nowhere at the same time)".

Animals behaving like humans, painted words that look like corporate brands/signs, bathers diving into waterfalls where religious practices take place…These works seem to consider the notion of integration while representing boundary issues. There are landscapes that function as portraits of a state of being; where religion and regenerative agricultural practices are accomplices; while planting the magical as a way of escaping the traumatic. All this brings us to the notion of conflict, "and the extent to which the forces of conflict guide historical events and the way we think about them." 

In the chaos and harmony where clouds blow minds, we encounter a hybrid of mysticism and a forest of signs and interactions that appear to be profoundly fluid and tender; while examining contemporary biopolitics and what might survive beyond the mountains of tradition.

Viktor El-Saieh was born in Port-Au-Prince, in 1988. His works have been presented at Locust Projects, Miami; El-Saieh Gallery, Port-Au-Prince; and CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, among other places.  His work is currently on view at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and has been recently acquired by both PAMM and the ICA Miami. This is Viktor El-Saieh’s third individual presentation at the gallery.

Viktor El-Saieh in Italics

Diego Singh in Normal Arial

(1) The Dragon Vein in traditional Chinese art are the invisible threads or connectives which hold a painting together.

José Delgado Zuñiga

Noises

February 7, 2021–April 7th, 2021

José Delgado Zuñiga 's “Noises” explores Painting as an additive process focused on free association, pluralities and confines. In a painting titled “No Exit”, a staircase ascends, and a man with closed eyes is depicted as if a large figure carries him upwards (The Pieta comes to mind).[I] Praying hands crown the top of the scene. Religion and Death are inscribed in a domestic space, next to an electrical outlet, while a figure (might be Zuñiga, or Death?) appears, rendered in grayscale and autobiographical undertones. This particular painting brings to mind images of Zuñiga’s first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, titled “Quotidian”—In the scenes presented in that exhibition, Death was another participant encountering bodies dancing, or fighting. It was clearly depicted in a funeral scene where Zuñiga’s self-portrait, painted in greens and yellows, was housed in a coffin, while being serenaded by a singer resembling his father.

The paintings in “Noises” accumulate concepts and influences, piling them up, as sound and bodies are often found, in the mass grave of white noise. Zuñiga is presenting paintings that evoke the bombardment of love and loss, hope and its musicality; all brought together by an artist set on observing dialectical relationships. This effort ”implies conflating two distinct notions: impossibility and Interdiction. To declare that a given subject is unrepresentable by artistic means is, in fact, to say several things at once” [II]

Below, some notes written by José Delgado Zuñiga on his work:

"Painting transforms and transitions, exploring with various formal approaches, opening new perspectives and insights. In my work, I attempt to paint representation, abstraction, realism, and illusion in a single frame, a momentary ‘presentness’. This approach enables me to hack into my identity and mind without worrying about authenticity. The work synthesizes painting styles of North American and European cultures. My heritage is built from those regions; one is a conquered history, the other attempts to shape my present and future. Painting nourishes me, redefining symbols and forms that are both empowering and oppressive to me.

Summoned by the hollowness of objects, I use “still life” to power up and transform personal memories, traumas, and desires into large painting formats, reinterpreting traditional themes such as vanitas and memento mori. I am also inspired by the Mexican “Corrido" ballad format, which builds narratives and stories composed of symbols and signs; and by the sound of music, lyrics, onomatopoeia, and interjections jam packed against each other. Or by perpetual fractured rhythms, forms, colors, and rhyming compositions that activate visual scores. I paint symbols and faces of power, identity, affect, memory, domesticity, and transience.

My body of work functions like a choir sobbing, grunting, chuckling, sighing, panting, sniffing, murmuring... I wrestle with the notion of painting a fixed iconography, because its density and opacity enclose my being, identity, and seeing. It is important to me that meaning is never fixed; it must be fluid, transparent, in flux like paint's materiality. It must dissolve and transform.”

José Delgado Zuñiga was born in 1988, in Ventura, California. He lives and works in New York. He completed his MFA in painting in 2017 at Columbia University, New York, where he was an adjunct professor of Painting from 2017-2019. He is currently the Lead Teaching Artist and Muralist at Groundswell, Brooklyn, New York.

Zuñiga was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant; and the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Community Grant both in 2018. He has presented his first Solo show “Quotidian”, in 2019 at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; and exhibited his paintings at the Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, in New Haven, Connecticut; The Ventura Museum, California; the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California; The Miriam and Ira D Wallach Gallery, at Columbia University, New York City; East Projects, New York; and has participated at the Bronx Museum program: Artists in the MarketPlace. (AIM), New York. His paintings are in numerous international collections. This is his second solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach.

[I] The Pietà by Michelangelo Buonarroti is a Renaissance sculpture housed in St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City.

[II] Ranciere, Jacques: Aesthetics and its Discontents, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009.

December 2, 2020–January 20, 2021

The gallery will be open by appointment only, please make one at central@centralfine.com

In this presentation curated by Tomm El-Saieh, new and historical works are brought together to offer three important artistic perspectives in Haitian Art.

André Pierre’s paintings of the Loa (spirits of Haitian Voodoo, often referred to as “the Mysteries” or “the Invisible Ones”) have influenced many artists in Haiti, including Myrlande Constant and Jean-Hérard Celeur. Echoes of Pierre’s paintings are present in Constant and Celeur’s current work. In this presentation, mermaids abound, humanoid birds stand erect, and “the Invisible Ones” (the Loa) congregate in same space.

André Pierre

Pierre, a Voodoo Priest, painted on gourds destined for offerings to the Voodoo deities until his friend, Maya Deren, introduced him to Le Centre D’Art in Port-au-Prince during the late 40s and suggested that he started painting on wooden panels and canvas. This transition introduced Pierre’s work (which had previously only been seen by Voodoo practitioners attending ceremonial spaces) to a wider audience. In December 2016, Tomm El-Saieh curated André Pierre’s first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE; many of the exhibited works were then loaned for documenta 14 (2017) in Athens and Kassel.

Myrlande Constant

In 2018, El-Saieh curated Myrlande Constant’s first solo presentation at the CENTRAL FINE. Constant’s Voodoo flags have revolutionized the process of traditional Voodoo flag-making since the 90s by introducing a series of innovations to these sacred objects. Traditionally, Voodoo flags are built using sequins, shining objects intended to invoke the Loa and thereby call them into religious ceremonies. The flags are filled with imagery of veves (religious Voodoo symbols). Constant introduced tambour beading to her Voodoo flags, an ancient embroidery technique used for haute couture which she learned while working at a wedding dress factory in the 90s. She composes her new works with scenes that present the Loa and humans in connection—in exchanges, engaging in various activities. In her works, the Guede (deities that embody Fertility and Death) are sometimes seen drinking and playing music, while humans start changing, as if taken by the spirits.

Constant’s works, densely constructed in glass beads and sequins, also bring the mundane and the divine together. An electric guitar frames a scene where sirens and water deities are reunited. The golden electric guitar is sewn next to albino fish (offerings to the deities). The deliberate placement and merging of highly diverse elements within the same composition reveals an essential element of Constant’s work. Her Voodoo flags create a space that is not affected by the laws of a conditioned reality, but rather, is guided by other forces—the Artistic and the Religious experience.

Constant embroiders her last name as a ‘constant,’ as a signifier that floats over the scenes on her flags, revealing a notion of self-portraiture in her works as well as suggesting that her representation of Voodoo deities is highly personal. This key aspect links Myrlande Constant’s work to Andre Pierre’s—both artists give faces to the Loa (the Invisible Ones), bringing them into our realm. Constant, however, expands her repertoire of Voodoo representation by creating new faces for the deities, developing a ‘lexicon,’ a highly personalized encyclopedia that represents the invisible forces in Voodoo Religion. She also sometimes uses the fabric that frames her works to make her own dresses, another cross-over between fashion and religion, which ultimately expresses a need to utilize material means in various, unexpected ways. At the Faena Festival: “The Last Supper” (curated by Zoe Lukov, 2019), Constant exhibited one of her largest works to date, which she decided to frame with a black circular garment. She used the remaining material to fashion herself a dress and a head-piece, which she wore at the opening, dressing and enveloping herself with the same framing material of her work.

Jean-Hérard Celeur

Jean-Hérard Celeur’s sculptures present hybrids of humanoid birds in war-like attire. Often made from found wood or car tires, his sculptures reclaim and repurpose discarded materials and the associations they carry, underlining the widespread poverty that surrounds Celeur in Haiti and the ensuing need to use any and all available resources to denounce it. “My work has social and intellectual aspects, and represents the people’s demands for change,” explains Celeur. “I live in the reality that deals with poverty every day.”[i] In his studio, a standing mermaid sporting a wired hat expresses gestures of political and artistic resistance as well as a desire to bring together the divine figure with the poverty and scarcity prevalent in Haiti. Death and life, sex and celebration, violence and excess, politics and sociological concerns, encounter each other in Celeur’s works.

Works by André Pierre (b. 1916, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; d. 2005) have been presented in numerous international exhibitions, most recently at documenta 14 (2017) in Athens and Kassel. Pierre painted at the El-Saieh gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for over 21 years.

Myrlande Constant (b.1968, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) has exhibited her work at Pioneer Works, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Le Grand Palais, Paris; Brown University, Providence; among other institutions. Constant has also presented her work at the El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, and CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, among other locations. A survey of her work, curated by Katherine Smith, will take place at the Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles in 2021.

Jean-Hérard Celeur (b. 1966, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) has exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale; Le Grand Palais, Paris; Pioneer Works, New York; The Frost Art Museum, Miami; the El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince; among other venues. Celeur is a senior member of Atis Rezistanz, a group of sculptors working at the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince.

[i] Gordon, Leah, “The Sculptors of Grand Rue: Reinterpreting Slavery,” Dazed & Confused (March 2007).

A presentation curated by Tomm El-Saieh.

Myrlande Constant, Constanza Schaffner, Diego Singh

Dec 1st- Jan 30 2021

Effacing traces, operating with traces is a capacity. A way of preserving a void, which has nothing to do with the content, neither positive nor negative, of demand.

The disruption wherein anxiety is evinced arises when this void is totally filled in.

This, then, is a self-portrait show.

September 13- October 18, 2020

Constanza Schaffner’s self-portraits appear as narrations without clear plots, presenting a skin/texture that isn’t smoothened over by filters, but rather informed by nature and culture, symbolically articulating otherness. Her work echoes opera and cinema, as an early inspiration for Constanza was found, for instance, in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s use of close-ups in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1924).

Schaffner’s self-portraits seem to look out, or gaze inwards, opposing the centrality of narcissism by opening themselves up to mutations, as feathers grow, and patterns from nature appear inscribed as a wrinkle. As Schaffner points: I also emphasized the creases in the skin and knuckles, by painting small geometrical and abstract compositions in each of them, thinking about the shapes of plants, flowers, or the barks of trees. I was inspired by Dante’s Forest of the Suicides, a circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy in which those who have committed suicide are punished with metamorphosing into branches of trees for the rest of eternity.

The titles of her paintings avoid locking down the reading of the self-portrait as one, by constructing various scenarios –one painting is Adentro Hay Algo (There’s Something Inside), another is It Never Came, or, there’s Siesta (Nap), in which Constanza closes her eyes, hit by a harsh light, forcing herself (perhaps) to sleep, or to remember something… (The siesta time is a liminal moment in Argentina, and particularly in provinces such as Entre Ríos, were Schaffner partly grew up. During the hours between 1-4 PM businesses close, and people go to sleep, while children are abducted by elfs –as legends would have it– in plain daylight.)

In Entre Ríos, after the siesta, once a year and for days, people celebrate the Carnaval de Gualeguaychú, wearing costumes sporting feathers and bright colors, rhythmically trespassing the rigidness and the bureaucracy of the collective Super Ego.

What follows are some of Schaffner’s notes on feathers, Magical Realism, portraiture, etc.-

Feathers

One could think of the feathers in the self-portraits as adornment, fashion, camp, in terms of the Lacanian idea of the function of art as that of seducing the gaze. In particular, Lacan talks of the function of painting as that of being a dompte-regard, a taming of the gaze:

“The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, might be summed up thus –‘You want to see? Well, take a look at this!’ He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons.”

This Lacanian idea is connected to the work of Roger Caillois. Caillois developed what he called ‘diagonal sciences,’ establishing connections between an array of areas of knowledge and, most notably, between the animal world –of instinct– and the human world –of freedom. In Méduse et Cie, he theorized art as the human analogous to the animal phenomenon of mimicry, which includes different strategies to counteract the aggressor’s gaze: travesty, when the animal tries to appear as a representative of another species; camouflage, when the animal manages to be confused with its environment; and intimidation, when the animal paralyses or frightens its aggressor. Could we then maybe think of the feathers as mimicry, as simultaneously travesty, camouflage and intimidation –all strategies to tame the gaze? I expose myself but I also protect myself.

Magical Realism

The feathers in the paintings also point towards the idea of metamorphosis into a bird. I use imagery from Latin American symbolism and mythology and repurpose it as utopia, as images of hope for a better future –a future of more symbiosis with nature. As utopian dream-symbols, the portraits combine despair with hope.

Magical Realist writers also subverted sacred and secular colonial myths, by repurposing them into expressions of resistance and revolution –against colonizing modernity and a reactionary appropriation of these myths by the Church.

Realismo Mágico is both connected to and at odds with Surrealism. As Michael Taussig explains, its founder, Alejo Carpentier, frequented the Surrealist circle in Paris but, precisely, reacted against it: he found it too heavy-handed, in its effort to create magic by taking forms from dream or decontextualizing artifacts from ‘primitive’ civilizations. In his return from Paris to Haití in 1943, Carpentier realized he didn’t need the artifacts, because “there in the streets and the fields and the history of Haiti the marvelously real was staring him in the face. There it was lived. There is was culture, marvelous yet ordinary.” 2 He discovered lo real maravilloso, the ordinariness of the extraordinary in Latin America.

Notes on self-production and self-alienation

1.-Self-portrait: Already Nietzsche noticed that it is better to be a work of art than to make art (The Birth of Tragedy, via Boris Groys).

2.-The face. The face is the place where the struggle for truth happens (Agamben). The face is the passion for revelation.

3.-I produce myself as I constantly question and declare myself: my poiesis is my poetics.

4.-I place the self at the center of the artistic production, only to declare it an artificial construction, challenging the myth of unity. I turn myself into an object, I alienate myself. Rimbaud: “The I is another.”

Schaffner’s work, then, could be considered both centrally and laterally, as the self-portrait can be recognized as one, but also as embodying the otherness of the other, alterity. Her approach to Painting actively defies the optimization of texts/surfaces, making contact with the ‘negativity’ attributed to whatever escapes the censorship that insists on Flattening and on the elimination of subjectivities.

Constanza Schaffner lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1989. She studied Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She won an Argentinian national award for academic merit and, in 2013, moved to NYC to pursue a PhD in the Department of Comparative Literature of NYU, with a full fellowship. Schaffner taught at NYU and gained her MA, while at the same time pursuing a studio practice. Self-taught, her practice encompasses painting, drawing and collage, and stems from her realization of the limits of philosophy for the comprehension of reality, in an attempt to instead “open” meaning, rather than force it into rational-linguistic categories. Schaffner had her exhibition debut at the artist-run project space Plymouth Rock in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2018. She is writing her PhD dissertation –directed by Ara Merjian and Boris Groys – titled “The Sacred as Resistance and Revolt: Bloch, Pasolini, Bresson,” which she plans to turn into a book. Her work is now part of the Hall Foundation, and this is her first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 111.

2 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: a Study In Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 166.

Constanza Schaffner’s notes in Italics, Brooklyn, 2020

Diego Singh’s notes in Arial Normal, Miami Beach, 2020

March 15th - June 15th, 2020

Opening Sunday, March 15th, By Appointment Only

Didactics and oppression, hand in hand, hands and feet tied underwater, make sure that the importance of being comfortable in an airless environment is understood. Learning how to be drown-proof and how to endure forced suffocation and extreme control, emphasizes our possibility of collapse. It’s as if one is being monitored or micromanaged by the insecurity of the gaze that insists on exposing internalized bullying tactics while masking them through the watery lens of stable ambiguity.

In this exhibition, Kyle Thurman renders bodies emerging from other bodies, bodies under water, others under pressure, colliding with one another; many of them are bound. In Miami, where water indicates a literal rising danger and an illustration of denial, this presentation could seem site-specific, and yet, it isn’t necessarily so. This body of work further develops Thurman’s Suggested Occupations series, exhibited since 2016 at Off Vendome, CENTRAL FINE, Sophie Tappeiner, the Whitney Museum of American Art; and most recently, at David Lewis in New York.

In this unsettling series, labor, the narratives of emancipation, the erotic, and their associations, all merge into predetermined colored backgrounds, permeating the bodies drawn and painted on them. Thurman mentioned that a type of presence, that manifests itself through pigment, appears in these works. It could be a materiality that rests, colors, and up to a certain point, defines the drawn men. This undefined presence, both a skin or a cloud, coats the works in full ambiguity and possibility.

In Heard Through Bone, by re-presenting men from images found online, Thurman’s work may point towards self-portraiture as analysis, as a means of exercising a type of accountability while observing tasks and various levels of accumulated pressure. This is a pressure deposited on us (and by us, I mean to include biodiversity, all species and systems, whatever; as everything must obey and endure. Adapt and untie itself from itself and learn to accept impotence as a productive force against the backdrop of Nothingness).

How to perceive through our own inner solidity, our bones, and our organism’s limits? How to prepare for extreme scenarios? One can hear oneself, muffled by water and the insanity of the invisible, yet palpable, weight. The weight of the word/world, of orders, of jobs that vampirize youth in tension, at its productive peak. An old hand molding through waves, crushing time.

- Diego Singh, March 2020

This is Kyle Thurman’s second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE. He was recently included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, curated by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley. His works are now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

February 16th - March 11th, 2020

Opening Sunday, February 16th from 6 - 9PM

Loriel Beltran started working on these paintings over a decade ago focusing on cuts, materialities and what returns as an inscription where the conceptual and the physical converge. Beltran’s work insists on holding within a type of collapse and emergence, observing time’s plasticity as if it was possible to approach it via color, hyper-defined lines, weight, and breakages. One can gather that Beltran’s painting practice considers the heterogeneity of experience beyond the aura of organic unity1, emphasizing time as a crucial actor.

A tactile mise-en-scene appears when the imaginary thickens, and it is at that very moment when years of collecting, devising, and pouring pigment, seem to solidify in the irretractable limit established by the cut. This act (cutting), as a modality, affirms a space that holds all subjective vibes and timings in suspense. In Beltran’s praxis nothing is assured, but rather, all is sliced and re-formatted by what resides beyond the concept of Loss. It’s best not to offer any resolutions here, as Painting doesn’t carry the delusion of progress anymore, but rather, presents the solidarity of the circular as its vibrance and pulse.

Beltran mentions that he is interested in “real weight and historical weight in coalition”, considering Painting’s capacity to hold time within, symbolically and on the surface. His paintings, also, seem intent to function as an aporia, containing internal contradictions that point to the relationships between abstraction and figuration, the space that exists between Painting and Sculpture, or the inevitable (gravity) and the intentional (art-making).

Here are a few excerpts from Beltran’s notes on his works:

“These paintings are as intricate as the baroque, and as sparse as minimalism. They are as much Gian Lorenzo Bernini as they are Agnes Martin. They are as much Bridget Riley in their opticality as they are Richard Serra in their process and weight.”

As a group they also subtly reference art historical tropes. There is Contrapposto, Landscape, Monochrome, Op and Kinetic art, stripes, etc. They are also both representational and abstract. Representational in that they depict reality in it’s full color spectrum, and also that they are part of a real sliced object. Abstract in that they are about line and color, weight and form.

They are also about Painting asserting its own definition, and the experience that comes with witnessing an object that is too complex to understand in a single viewing, as a single image. They assert Painting as objects, and reject paintings easily circulating as images.

Loriel Beltran was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1985. At age fifteen he moved to Miami where he later obtained a BFA from the New World School of the Arts. Beltran’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Frost Art Museum, Miami; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; the Museo de Arte Acarigua Araure, Acarigua, Venezuela; the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; etc. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Wolfsonian Museum Bridge Tender’s house; the Fredric Snitzer Gallery; and at the non-profit Locust Projects, in Miami.

Beltran was awarded the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists, in 2015. He was a co-founder and co-director of the artist run gallery and collective Noguchi Breton (formerly GUCCIVUITTON).

1 See Bubloch, Benjamin: Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting. October, Vol 16, pp. 39-68, 1981.

JAN 12TH-FEB 12TH, 2020

OPENING SUNDAY, JANUARY 12TH from 2020 6-9 PM

Hadi Fallahpisheh is often in a dark room where the notions of snapshot and long exposure meet without a camera. A body is ciphering a story, outlines of openings, entrapments, housing. Time stands against time and speeds or slows down, burning in the dark an image that always reveals itself through the opacities of speculation, the ID and poetry. Not everything is veiled here as the word Arrest floats as a signifier over, in and under these works. Something arresting, literally capable of commanding attention, appears after a series of operations break the uniformity of time and propose an elasticity that carries within an impurity that makes room for the depiction of other types of captivities, some self-imposed.

These works dive into the dark area where that thing that asks constantly for more ‘resides.’ When encountering its fences one is suddenly aware of the ambiguities and transformations that responding to such a petition implies.

What we can grasp are the exchanges between art and non-art (psychoanalysis, the political, the traumatic, and the poetic). And it’s precisely in this space that the literal splits itself in an encounter with a mirror covered by amnesia, and the word (that in being oppressed had to find a way to affirm itself through the cracks of mouse traps or cats that house mice or whatever) allows for a type of self-evasion and confrontation.

There’s a frailty and an endurance in that encounter with the thing that asks for more. One is facing what is not yet formed, and this is perhaps the work/text that becomes a convocation of persistent latencies, of states of indistinction, vibrating in shining photographic paper, painting with light, trying to erase the polarizations that suffocate what remains in a constant state of asking, demanding for more.

The physical and the psychological can’t be distinguished in life, and a darkroom, where the act of painting with light is almost a blind operation, allows for the ID to come through, although under somewhat controlled circumstances. There’s a ‘confusion’ of the psychological and the somatic as their divisions are rendered obsolete when the emergence of the semblance appears fully realized in the shape of a ‘photo-painting’, as I can’t quite define what these works are. They aren’t mere paintings of light, nor c-prints, nor performative actions; they present themselves in a state of indetermination/tension.

Let’s end here with Heraclitus’ concept of harmonia[1] who, unlike the Pitagorian harmonia (a resolution of tension), proposes maintaining tension. Only in maintaining it, not resolving it, is harmonia sustained.

Diego Singh, Miami, January 6, 2020.

Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) received an MFA in Photography from Bard College in 2016 and is a graduate of the Creative Practices Program in Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York. He was awarded the Artadia prize in 2018. Fallahpisheh has recently presented work at the following venues in New York: Tramps, Simone Subal, Kai Matsumaiya, Off Vendome, PAGE-NYC, and Callicoon Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited at TMOCA, Delgosha Gallery, Dastan Gallery and Maryam Harandi Gallery, all in Tehran. Fallahpisheh will participate in the upcoming group presentation In Practice: Total Disbelief at the Sculpture Center, New York, from January 16- March 23, 2020.

This is Hadi Fallahpisheh’s first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Cf., v. g., DK B51: “They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself (Literally, how being brought apart it is brought together with

itself): there is a back-stretched harmonia as in the bow and the lyre.” Kirk, G. S. and Raven J. E., The Pre-socratic Philosophers, Cambridge, CUP, 1977.

December 1st, 2019–January 9th, 2020

Opening Sunday, December 1 from 6-9 PM

Today’s space-race stories are recapitulations of colonial projects, masked as solutionism and utopic migration. The first world dreams of new extractive frontiers and their futures of terraformed, air-locked enclaves are unevenly distributed.

They split the atmospheres of the privatized and are selectively fertilized from the extracted and exhausted. As much as they are aggregates of particles and molecules, these atmospheres are imaginaries—moods at social scale, narrative bubbles enveloping populations. Modeling these enclosures, Stragglers stages its architecture as a closed circuit of respiration and emission. Predictive scents are piped into and diffused in one space; sucked out and exhausted in another. The building is an organ constantly exhaling and inhaling, producing and dumping.

Silos

Initiated as a collaborative research laboratory, the International Space Station (ISS) now acts as an outpost for the commercialization of outer space. Sustaining the longest, continuous human presence off earth since its launch in 1998, the station is a life support system for its inhabitants. Generating its own oxygen, the ISS tests how biotic processes grow, regenerate or fail in other habitats. The entry and exit into the closed world of the ISS is a pressurized airlock which separates the hospitable from the inhospitable. Like the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, the station is a bunker where the reproduction of life is sealed and suspended. Though ostensibly sealed, both spaces are subject to leakage, contaminants, and unseen exchanges. After the “Old World” brought it’s diseases with its crops to the “New World” in the Columbian Exchange, the skin and hair particles of astronauts clogged NASA’s early space simulators. Using air-flow software that renders how oxygen fills volumes, Silos presents the airlock as a similarly unstable architecture, a body that is not sterilized and static but instead subject to deflation and unmanaged life.

Stressors

Limp hammers struggle to strike deformed alarm bells, which have been overfed with electricity and minerals. The gears slowly turn but the warped physics of the mechanism fail to generate a sound. Framed in the high-visibility colors of ambulances, the emergency of the alarm is muted, incessant and normalized.

Ideopaths and Extremophiles

While it usually burrows deep into the human body, an endoscopic camera travels in Ideopaths and Extremophiles through a series of architectural arteries and clogged infrastructures—air conditioner filters, shower drains, electrical conduits, car engines. Excerpts skimmed from online medical forums of self-diagnosed conditions with unknown causes trail through the passages. They speak of insides projected onto space and speculate on environmental factors at the microbial level. Reshuffling causalities and scales, perceptions and prognoses, access or denial of care orients one’s semiotic world.

Pollinators

Air-borne particles both fertilize and choke atmospheres: pollen travels from flowers’ stamens to other flowers; brake pads and tires grind into a micro-dust that diffuses past the roads they travel. Volatile compounds bind to the senses. Smell is the perception of this traffic.

Synthesized from petroleum, formed into tires, worn out and then recycled into a colored gravel for landscaping—rubber, is one of these traveling particulates. Like many polymers, it moves from the planet’s bowels to its top layer, circulating and accumulating. In its recycled form, it’s meant to resemble mulch and fertilizer. Some call this green. Playgrounds and landfills are typically surfaced with these squishy, compacted bits.

Cooper Jacoby (b.1989) lives and works in Los Angeles. His solo exhibitions include Susceptibles, High Art, Paris (2018); Disgorgers, Swiss Institute at the LUMA Foundation, Zurich (2017); Bait, Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2017); and Matte Wetter, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2016). Jacoby has participated in group exhibitions at FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris (2019); Villa Datris, l’Isle-Sur-La-Sorgue (2019); Swiss Institute, On-Site, New York (2019); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015); and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2015). 

Stragglers is his first solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach.

September 23^rd - October 30^th, 2019
Opening on Sunday, September 22nd from 6-9 pm

[… I did not notice that tear
Become mountains
When they run to the sea
On the side of your lips...]

In the past I was observing peoples’ movements and behaviors, as well as listening to their different voices during strictly performance-based workshops, assemblies, and meetings. During the preparation for Dynamis [1], I had the chance to work intensively with more than 200 people: I realized that the voice manifests the body’s interiority. By breathing, singing, or talking, the voice moves inside the body, touches the interior organs, and in a way colors them through vibration.

Now, I am trying to move away from the current ‘beginning-end’ calendar of consuming events and projects to develop a routine, which in the past I would only execute on my own. A self-training process builds up into a shared practice/treatment.

The Greek word ίαση (pron. iasi) refers to the time and process by which a body changes through illness. There is no such thing as recuperation and a healthy, normal state. There is a stage that allows the person to recognize, explore, and learn from their pain. There is a way to navigate the pain by learning from it.

Some bodies, which means some voices, are under shock and there is a need to form steps for recovery. By altering the tune of the voice, the body starts to vibrate differently, and some of the organs in pain will start to feel better.

Through voice training I follow and observe each participant to tune differently and support them to experience another interiority of their body. By that tuning they become stronger and physically better. The diaphragm is not really an organ but a muscle; it lies between the upper and lower part of the body and situates the balance amongst what is inside and outside the spine. It sets the balance and distributes the air, thus it tunes the voice throughout the whole body. Every breath is a tone to the interior and exterior of life. While taking care of the breath, the voice starts to sound as it is formed, and the whole world starts to vibrate differently.

Georgia Sagri, 2019, Athens

[1]Dynamis(2017) comprised of twenty-eight sculptures, ten breathing scores and six days of demonstration / performance simultaneously and in continuum, in both Athens and Kassel during documenta 14.

Diaphragm will be Georgia Sagri’s second solo show at Central Fine.

Georgia Sagri has exhibited internationally in various solo and group exhibitions: Mimosa House, London (2020), Portikus, Frankfurt/ Main, Germany (2018); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2017, 2018); Cycladic Museum, Athens Greece (2017); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2016); Sculpture Center, New York, USA (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2016, 2015); Forde, Geneva, Switzerland (2015); Kunsthalle Basel Switzerland (2014); MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2013); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2013); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2011); MoMA, New York, USA (2011); Macedonian Museum, Thessaloniki, Greece (2011); The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece (2006). Sagri has also participated in documenta 14 (2017), Manifesta 11 (2016), Istanbul; Biennial (2015), Lyon Biennial (2013), Whitney Biennial (2012), Thessaloniki Biennial (2011), and Athens Biennial (2007). In 2014 Sagri initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE (hyle.gr) a semipublic/semiprivate space in the center of Athens, Greece. Her first monograph catalogue was published by Sternberg Press, following her solo exhibitions Georgia Sagri Georgia Sagri at Kunstverein Braunschweig,and Georgia Sagri and I at Portikus.

In the summer of 2019 she was offered the Tenure Position in the School of Fine Arts in Athens in order to organize and run the first Performance Art studio.

April 7-May 31st, 2019

Opening April 7th, from 6-9 pm. 

X worked with ghosts inventing an unconscious.

One can place the most intimate biography (there are others) in the bag of expectations and face the ending of anticipatory anxiety, being fine with whatever stays. It is possible to look at the representation of what’s close (to one), so its abstraction can be. But I can barely stand to look at the nosey lined face of some relatives and I find myself deliberately avoiding it all, sustaining the actuality of something too real. 

Here I am, administering words when everything is extracted, taken, forgotten, and reassembled by tech-ectoplasms. Either way, Another is here and It cannot forget the Another; who’s excavation brings back the mnemonic blackouts that make every day, every day. This situation is the ultimate, artificially invoked and agglutinated, uncanny. 

Blake Rayne’s works, to me, show up in sequence, and image/word produce an articulation and the intimacy of not knowing. One inevitably looks at the paintings and suddenly there’s the realization that there is a group of ‘there ares’, and the humming of a choir.

Painting, in Rayne’s paintings, is something that is and isn’t. Something that brings one back to the sound or the note of a practice that ventures into the poetic, to Techne[1] and the plasticity of Phronesis[2] .

In Brother Ass, carbon-based reconstructions of a famous Neanderthal Skull hang in proximity to the first presentation of the “Daylight Savings, 2019” drawings (which could be read as a wiggling line/cave, subjected to the policing of saving something, while retreating or emerging). Alongside, a pleated sculpture (that is inscribed) they announce a series of relationships between the diagrammatic, the monumental and malleability. All of the works seem to be packing detours, delays, and what is ontologically or epistemologically speculative, reconsidering our memory crash.

And so, in this presentation, a Neanderthal Skull from our closest extinct relative has been painted from various vantage points, and remains open: It appears as Archipelago, a titillating octopus, or a musical interlude, always reminding us of a parenthesis. Pointing to its own extraction and the material named by the petro-industry that brought it together.

Moreover, Brother Ass holds within the disruptions that site-specificity demands, while the possibilities of learning through material and material history are suspended between immersion, appearance and disappearance. 

After the ghosts and extraction, the mineshaft that lingers, lies neither in representation nor in mediation. It is a hallway in shock, located, like an X, like a skull, mapping the sight of its fullness—announcing an archive pulsating in a background of amnesia. 

To end things here: In Rayne’s Brother Ass, materiality in migration sustains the in-flux, touching the supposedly immovable infrastructures of personality, language and institutions; fading in and out, in a space as thick as a road trip, headed into full contact. 

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2019

Blake Rayne (b. 1969, Lewes, Delaware) lives and works in New York. Rayne received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts and was the Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts (2003-2009). His work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, France; Künstlerhaus, Graz, Austria; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; Artists Space, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; The Kitchen, New York; and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas, among others. His solo exhibitions include: Shade Subscription at Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin; Peaceful Photographers at Campoli Presti, London and Paris; Warmilk  at Mendes Wood, São Paulo; On Fridays We Have Half Days at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Blake Rayne at Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach; Coastal Graphics at Sutton Lane, Paris; and Folder and Application at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Rayne’s works have been acquired for the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, the Pinault Collection, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others.

Brother Ass is Blake Rayne’s first solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE. His solo exhibition DOGSKULLDOGS at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (Sept-Oct, 2018) and Carbon Days at Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto (Oct-Nov, 2018) prefigure this show as part of an exhibition series.

1 As an activity, Techne is concrete and variable.

2 Phronesis is understood here as connected to conscience and resoluteness, a type of being-resolved in action as práxis. As such, it discloses the  possibilities of being in a situation, as the starting point of meaningful action.

February 24th- March 31st, 2019

OPENING SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24th from 6-9 PM  

Squatting, lighting a candle, dancing, cooking, changing the color of light bulbs, singing, walking, painting within daylight, on occasion, under fluorescent light, accounting, forgetting, and recovering. In her solo show Lo, Whitney Claflin explores possibilities in different grammars, and addresses a sum of gaps that interconnects what one sees and how one records meaning. Claflin approaches poiesis [1] as something that stands against the stratification of the pictorial gesture, by presenting something that remains fluid. 

Translation

The title Lo, in Spanish, may translate as 'that which is/was', in English. In Spanish, this ‘lo’ applies a masculinity to an otherwise neutral object—a masculine Other. What follows the article form of ‘lo’ is gender unspecified, linguistically—lo vivido, lo comido, lo danzado, lo lingüístico (“That which was lived,” “that which was eaten,” “that which was danced,” “that which is linguistic”). The noun forms of these phrases are feminine: la vida, la comida, la danza (“The life,” “the food,” “the dance”) and the adjective lingüístico is masculine (“Linguistic”). 

In English, Lo recalls low, as in lo-fi, lo-res, lo-down, and so on…

Semblance

Lacan defines the Semblance as an imaginary and symbolic construction that exists beyond anatomy, genetics, etc. He defines Lalangue as a maternal tongue, pre-verbal, universal, and yet, unique to each human (We will circle back into this in a few lines). 

Lo, in Spanish, could be read as a masculine Other. In Painting, due to a machismo aligned with legibility (As propagated by a political agenda in the advent of Modernism in New York in the late 40’s), we still see this Other revived in various avatars, again and again. There is a demand for what is readable and identifiable; however, in Claflin’s practice we see Semblances and planes constantly upending legibility; we witness the poetic space where the pictorial gesture meets Lalangue, emphasizing what exists beyond grammar.

Clearly, now, there is a need to question the approach to the Semblance of a praxis, and perhaps propose other possibilities. A praxis is, after all, defined through absence and possibility. That which lies outside the limits of what is art and what is not art is the very material of art; and, that which lies outside the stratification of language is the very material of language.

Painting

Claflin’s work moves beyond formal notions of challenging, overcoming, and arriving, focusing instead on an openness that emerges from experimentation, free association, and continual displacement. The holes, texts, and ‘foreign’ objects in her paintings open the pictorial and conceptual plane, allowing poetic knots or linguistic operations to signal the proliferation of the open into the open.

These paintings affirm a type of hermetic and yet hyper-open research. They consider the notion of 'the foreign', manifested as something intrinsic that oscillates between dissociation and integration, internally and intimately. The paintings lucidly register various spaces and define the trajectory of that which keeps running towards a sum of layers that collapse, re-emerge, and are (physically) rebuilt over and over. This is a type of lyrical praxis that embraces the plural, articulating both the failures and possibilities of existing structures.

Text

In the titles and surfaces of the works, we find allusions to music, a beach, a walk in a landscape, which then become narratives. The borders between imagination and memory, are not borders in these works—they coexist and are unified aspects of a viewpoint and a praxis. The paintings seem to want to be direct, and so, Lo opens and shuts down constantly, not in titillation, not sequentially, but intrinsically. What is established in one instance is vanquished or exploded in the next. 

*

In Lo, there are images or graphics--wine, flowers, horizons, stars...mood clues gathered together. Text is culled from a variety of sources. Voices are distorted and reconfigured. What something means in one moment may change in the next. But this does not mean you can forget what it meant at first.

passages in italics: Whitney Claflin, Brooklyn, New York, 2019

passages in Arial normal: Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2019

Whitney Claflin (b. 1983, Providence, RI) received an MFA from Yale University (2009). She has exhibited at Real Fine Arts, New York; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; and is currently participating in a group exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, New York, until April 20th, 2019. Claflin has read poetry and performed at Real Fine Arts, New York; the Emily Harvey Foundation, New York; among other places. This is her first solo presentation at CENTRAL FINE. 

1 Poiesis: the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before." Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιεῖν, which means "to make".

January 19th-February 18th, 2019

OPENING January 19th, from 6-9 PM

Music encounters nature, policing, racial profiling, history and death in the paintings of José Delgado Zuñiga. Music is a departing point in his work, it inspires and lends compositional tactics that aim at articulating a narrative. Delgado Zuniga’s knowledge of music emerges directly from his father’s experience as a singer of Corridos, ballads that outline politics, love, and daily experience. Corridos could be thought of as journals that preserve and pass on oral history.

While visiting his studio last year, Jose mentioned Vanilla Ice. He showed me a drawing of the rapper and talked about the song “Ice Ice Baby” at a time when the crisis of babies and children separated from their parents exploded on the border and the news. The figure of an all-American performer (Vanilla Ice, born in Texas) was treated as a synthesis of an empire which is perennially ready to take over whichever cultural elements it deems necessary: territories, music, children, etc.

Appropriation (of people, ideas, land, rhythms) is the everyday, today. But, beyond appropriation, there is reclamation and re-interpretation, necessary operations in updating the traumatic, that are central to Zuñiga’s work. By addressing the history of Mexican muralism, Zuñiga updates its history when presenting scenes that define today’s clashes. In some works, ICE and its actors are surrounded by musicians in fights defined by color, textures and tension.

Another painting features a funeral where a self-portrait of José’s dead body is watched by a group of Mexican musicians. The tone of his yellowish corpse is no longer brown. In this death scene and in the other encounters present in Zuñiga’s work, painting focuses not only on depictions, but also on a performance always directed towards the activation and analysis of its own constitutive elements. Zuñiga describes his approach to painting in relation to Mexican music as follows: “It’s important to use the Corrido as a strategy to construct a narrative in painting. When painting to music, I am the band conductor and image maker, I am the sound that expresses color. Color is the trace of my memory, the stream of my experience…”

In Quotidian, Painting addresses political issues exploring music, portraiture, or the normalization of violence and hatred, treating them in a cartoonish way, as if a synthesis of the monstrous was possible through stylization. In these works, as in reality, the uncanny and history demand a second look: moving beyond revisionism, one can access the poetic and the urgent, touching on its monstrosity and musicality, while reflecting on the possibility of self-assessment. The Quotidian, in the end, appears in these paintings as a timely performance determined by various openings and ultimatums.

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2019

José Delgado Zuñiga (b.1988, Ventura, California) lives and works in New York. He completed an MFA in Painting (2017) at Columbia University, where he is currently the Adjunct Professor of Painting. Zuñiga was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2018. He is also a resident at the Bronx Museum (2018-2019) and has recently exhibited his work at From Shape to Form, an Exhibition of Latinx Artists at Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, New Haven, Connecticut.

Quotidian at CENTRAL FINE is his first solo exhibition.

November 30 – January 16, 2019

Opening on November 30, from 6-9PM

This exhibition, titled Mongrel [1] , can suggest a humanization of Painting and address a biography, the lack of it, or its affirmation/negation. The works by Tomm El-Saieh include and bypass the biographical. They signal High Modernism’s faith in the pictorial gesture, its emphasis on the specificity and poetry of the mark, and on pigment application. And yet, unlike High Modernism’s objective aims; somehow, the biographical/narrative, which is bypassed and embraced, (purposefully here) remains.

In the canon of High Modernism, having a narrative or a depiction embedded somewhere has traditionally contested the politically fueled ideals that defined the movement. When art historian Henry Adams claimed to read Jackson Pollock’s signature across Mural (1943), some had a heart attack [2] . Are we looking at clouds shaped in the form of knives? Can we read humidity stains as the face of the Virgin Mary appearing in some remote town in northern Argentina? (She appears, often near rooftops, in the city of Salta).

Reading the biographic in abstraction is problematic, for the artist and the viewer. In abstract painting, extra-pictorial drama during the 50’s claimed to be avoided at all costs, aiming for a type of sublime specificity that could include a mechanic or by chance ‘accident’. This accidental human gesture was (and still is) preferred by the art-world at large, particularly in abstract painting, as it introduces a type of interference on the sublime’s quest for the objective. But, there’s a new type of abstraction in painting: the abstraction that emerges from a sense of dissociation from time, space, and context while screens capture everything. This abstraction is aware of its looks, lineages, and politics.

This ‘abstraction’ in painting seems tied to experience, to reality, and it is related to the abstraction of the self, which might sound like a ‘What’s going on here’? The biography, readable or not, is on the surface of the painting that comes from many origins, myths, patterns, encounters, nations, tongues and tensions. And in this integration is where the human trace is present.

The questions are huge: Are we in front of people? their lives? Can we detect their origins and DNA? The emphasis on the biography and origins of both El-Saieh and his paintings has been addressed since the first time he exhibited his works. The specific painterly aspect that merges the pictorial gesture, intentions, histories, and canons is evident on the surface. And the backgrounds (pictorial and personal), are both crucial to understanding his practice. These paintings signal the urgency of Integration [3].

Tomm El-Saieh was born in 1984 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He recently presented a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2017-2018); his first monograph, Tomm El-Saieh, was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in November 2018 based on his exhibition. El-Saieh’s work was also included in 2018 New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage and in the exhibition Gucci Vuitton at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2015). His is currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection’s exhibition: New Acquisitions.

This is Tomm El-Saieh’s second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

Diego Singh, November, 2018

1 Mongrel: Someone or something of uncertain origin. When referring to dogs: A mixed breed dog, or mutt, is a dog that does not belong to one officially recognized breed. The mongrel’s origins remain mythological, speculative, beyond the biographic. The etymological origins of the word mongrel (to “mong”, to mix, plus “rel” a pejorative diminutive) are present today in the emphasis on stereotypes that are setting us back in time.

2 Adams, Henry: Tom and Jack: The intertwined lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, Bloomsbury Press, November, 2009.

3 Integration: “act of bringing together the parts of a whole” from French intégration and directly from Late Latin integrationem (nominative integratio) “renewal, restoration” noun of action from past participle stem of Latin integrare “make whole”, also “renew, begin again.”

October 7- November 20, 2018

Opening Reception October 7th, From 6-9PM

A line (which can be any line—political, emotional, poetic, diagrammatic, or drawn) initiates these works. This line, steps onto and travels across colored seamless paper (typically used for commercial photo shoots). It punctuates a uniform color field in charcoal, marker, oil pastel and pencil. These marks poke, animate and charge the landscape at once, but also incrementally build static tension. The encounter is electric. Color on color engage in charged confrontation, like two magnets that repel each other’s likeness and are forced to share the same space. Some moments, however, suggest a kind of attraction, a softness rubbed on by a slight chance of embrace. Like Crazy Nature presents a gripping exchange between the line and its landscape, the drawn figure and its context.

The background field seems to reach out and restrain, even repress, the sinuous line that travels onto it—capturing it in the act. Rather than retreat and push the drawings forward, rather than support the bodies that live on it (or are held in it) as a backdrop that has truly dropped back, this ‘background’ color field reaches out to clasp the hand of that which lies in the foreground. Rather than harmoniously communing and merging with the depicted bodies or actions, leftover traces and transparencies of the readymade paper establish varying degrees of relationships with and between the drawn components…

This readymade ground does not merely manifests itself as an oppressive force. The drawings softly vibrate against the readymade background (which oddly does not swallow them up). Maybe the drawings are representations of a libido caught in the act of sleeping, fighting, running and captured by an autistic Eros.

In Thurman’s works we encounter Suggested Occupations[1] that possess or entrance the figures represented. Bodies, caught in the act of sleeping, fighting, running, could be an old acquittance. Thurman does not think of these drawings as self-portraits per se, but rather as embodiments of labor, sleep, rest, conflict, celebration, etc. All suggest a functional symbolism or a poetic and lucid blindness. The wandering line that begins these works is soon loaded with an accumulation of tensions, a sum of associated politics, as the artist takes it deeper into conversation. The figures linger and push themselves into something that remains reluctant to be registered, fully engaging with the thing[2].

The title of the show, Like Crazy Nature, could be read as three words chained into a Borromean movement. The gaps between words, portraiture, audience, emotion, speculation and failure converge, and we can see the Real escaping the confines of sense. It is in this space that the Real can act as a shifting semblance, were bodies fight, celebrate or sleep. The artist gazes at the paper or the sourced photograph from which he draws and builds layers. This space, where speech, memory, and fiction coexist on a plane, confronts us when we encounter the works. What we face, ultimately, is a form of active suspension.

Anger, fear, guilt/shame, envy/jealousy, and misfortune are a set of smaller works that act as punctuations. They occupy their own space standing as groups of directives depicted in moody yet vibrant colors. Like mirrors, they reflect past, present and future beings.

Diego Singh and Zelmira Rizo-Patrón, Miami Beach, 2019

Kyle Thurman (b. 1986, West Chester, PA) currently lives and works in New York. He studied film and fine arts at Columbia University and furthered his studies as a guest student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with Christopher Williams. Thurman later earned his MFA in painting at Bard College. Thurman has held exhibitions at Off Vendome, New York and Dusseldorf; Office Baroque, Brussels; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona; and Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid; among others. His work is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Thurman will participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

1 Suggested Occupations here refers to jobs suggested to Thurman at some point. These occupations can be read not only under the lens of labor, but also, as something that occupies and possesses the subject.

2 (Das Ding, Die Sache, La Chose), “the thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine.” Das Ding, the thing, la chose, is, that which cannot be explained. Lacan, Jacques, The seminar Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p. 125

September 1st - October 2nd, 2018

Opening Saturday, September 1st from 6-9 PM

A map, magic spells, a floor-plan, or any set of directives informed by silence, duplication, triplication, the folkloric are modes of pertinence and reference. Today is as it was thousands of years ago. What happens to the divisions and notions of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real when all three can be experienced simultaneously? 

Carlos Sandoval de León’s solo presentation 20 20 takes on such questions and brings varying materials and forms together, charging them with specificity and tension. Weights, platforms, openings, familial histories, water, mud, and knotted lines of a 14k gold alloy, all meet each other through personal and communal labors. This is important to Sandoval de León’s practice, as he works closely with a team of artisans and friends in the development of his work’s associative characteristics. One could say that his work considers how freedom is embodied in a relatable domestic noise; constantly in flux leaving a marked sense of the uncanny. 

In a room, a bulletproof window lays parallel to the ground, perforated methodically, building a grid of attempts to enter and to stop, just at the vortex of tension. A weaving, of sorts, takes place on top of this bulletproof surface through an alloy of 14k gold zigzagging trajectories, defining what looks like a constant current, or a long wave.

There’s penetrability and gold, two main ghosts that cross each other, on a hard blanket that is a window. This bulletproof Plexiglas window was an expensive and once-necessary object, picked up in Brooklyn and handled, facing its toxicity in a trance-like action of perforation while linking experiences and ideas (via a drill, lava beads placed on a rhythmic pattern, and the aforementioned golden wire). 

In other works, bricks from housing developments that are currently being revamped in Brooklyn were exchanged and reformatted into mini-bricks to signal their context, provenance and new tasks. Those tasks float around the notions of process and evaluation, hovering over the policing of bureaucracy, power and intention/tension. In these objects, the embodiment of freedom seems to project itself, configuring different architectures and establishing them, poetically. These bricks, mud, wood, are all homes that are never completely fixed. They emerge as materializations of houses built by animals, by people, or nature. Or as self-portraits, shaped by context as an oppressive force; which in turn, is being confronted and transformed by a poetic and yet, policing gaze. 

Sandoval de León describes his approach to this work as follows: “I’m going to try and map out the shape of unseen activity to give better understanding where flat lines lie. I want to do this, using ideas of portraiture, combining them with ritualistic operations/notions. This theoretical space that shapes the physical world is much of what has inspired 20 20.”

Diego Singh, Miami Beach

Carlos Sandoval de León (b. 1975, Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Mexico) has BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. Sandoval de León has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City; el Museo del Barrio, New York; Terri and Donna, Miami; and Mendes Wood DM gallery, Sao Paulo, among others.

Don’t Get Me Wrong [1]

MAY 12 - JULY 15, 2018

OPENING Saturday May 12th, from 4-10 PM

I had a dream where I was about to drown, and the scene was filled with anthems, light, pop songs, repressed texts, signs, crooked hats, rigid smiles, sketchy dots, cats wearing boots, etc. People fell from the sky into the ocean while phosphorescent animals gathered around, ready to eat them.

A w appears at the beginning of wall or water. After emerging from immersion, language can be spoken ‘normally’, building a nnno, a yyyes, paintings, universities, books, songs, and walks. Today we see that language needs to speak and read itself constantly. As language re-reads its failings, protests against language emerge.

Without this act of language looking at itself, we see more of the same: slogans showing up and syntheses appearing everywhere, which turn into cartoons/simplifications that aim to erase subjectivity, shaping the monstrous.

Right now we are in the midst of the time of the cartoon, the moment of the monstrous, and censorship. What’s next? The time of invention, that which is uncertain, nerve wracking and very clear. As all fails, one can invent how to short-circuit prescriptions and move on. Can one speak underwater?

(.......)

When speaking underwater—I’ve attempted that—eyes are clouded by bubbles, emotion and control. All becomes ‘abstracted’. At that moment one wonders: is abstraction a semblance? Language? Reality? One gasps and sound becomes a uuuhhwwhhwwwggglllugghhw, and perhaps that’s the way one talks every day?

(crickets)

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This is Diego Singh’s first solo exhibition in Miami since 2015, when he presented “Business Meeting With Dry Ear” a solo, and yet, dual presentation with Georgia Sagri at CENTRAL FINE.

This exhibition addresses the image of abstraction and how the shapeless and decentralized appears as a threatening face. Singh’s paintings are planes where his reality/signs are repressed and regrouped politically, poetically and psychologically.

Born in Argentina during the last years of the military dictatorship that censored and killed 30,000 people, making them ‘disappear’ (these victims are called los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones), Singh’s work addresses the notion of abstraction, politics, control, authority repression, what returns, obliquely watching and talking.

His work considers abstraction, its image and its implications, as something that emerges from experience and that is charged with the political (as noted by Andrea Elias’ text in “Because I like Beginnings” included in Table for One, a monograph on Singh’s work published in 2011 [2]). Military hats, neon signs, repressed words, skewed texts, have appeared as codes in his body of work, pointing to the authority, monstrosity, and power of language.

The exhibition brings together the “Perfect Paintings,” a group of works where representations of abstracted glowing lines/neon signs showed up in 2010, along with the “Line Paintings” started in 2004, which emphasize slowing down while re-presenting, with oil paint, ball-point look-a-like images. Don’t Get Me Wrong will also include the “Keeping Score Paintings,” a series that evolved from his 2012 Captcha series. The “keeping scores paintings” present music scores (which belong to anthems, religious, protest, and pop songs) veiled, filtered, overlapped and warped until their meaning is challenged, addressing painting’s as a repressed, living, and destabilizing medium.

Don’t Get Me Wrong presents a series of works that analyze painting as a language, while observing language. The notion of lalangue[3], formulated by Jacques Lacan, is central here: lalangue is a pre-verbal stage of language that is universal and personal, and as maternal waters or tongues go, lalangue/painting could both nourish or drown us.

Diego Singh was born in Salta, Argentina. He has exhibited his work at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami; MOCA San Diego; PAMM, Miami; the Fondazzione Malvina Menegas, Castelbasso, Italy; Braverman gallery, Tel-Aviv; Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo; the Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy; Tomio Koyama gallery, Tokyo; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Galleria Macca, Sardegna, Italy; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, among others.

Singh founded CENTRAL FINE in 2012, an artist-run-space in Miami Beach following the notion of the empty mask, the ideal role of the analyst, where people can upload content.

1 “don’t get me wrong” is a song composed by Chrissie Hynde and released by the pop-rock group the pretenders. It was the first single taken from the group’s 1986 album, ‘get close’.

2 Elias, Andrea, “Because I Like Beginnings,” published in table for one, a monograph on Diego Singh’s work, by Tomio Koyama gallery, Mendes Wood, Old Hand Office, 2011.

3 lalangue: a term coined by jacques lacan, which is defined as speech prior to grammatical or lexicographical organization. Lalangue is speech in its disjunction from the structure of language. Outside of grammar, housing in its holes, rumors and murmurs, it is the very site where desire is directed. The term is approached here as situated outside the father, coexisting with the oceanic feeling, making it a personal and yet, commonly shared experience. That said, lalangue is unique to each subject.

Curated by Tomm El-Saieh

March 21 –April 20, 2018

Opening Wednesday, March 21 from 6-10 PM

Within the Vodou community the flag is a sacred ritual object that identifies the hounfour and honors the spirits with whom it is associated. The sparkle of the sequin or mirror used to capture the attention of the Iwa started in the temples. Drapo Voudou (sequined sacred flags) are unfurled at the beginning of a ceremony. They are power points that are used for both identification and transformation. When the flag is unfurled it signals the congregants to come to order—the sacred is about to come home to roost. The spirits will soon walk next to (or in) the market woman.[1]

Myrlande Constant works in her studio/home, which is located on top of a hill, surrounded by glass-less windows. This is, perhaps, the perfect setting for her flags, which undulate as the wind makes its way into the rooms. 

Constant worked in a wedding dress factory with her mother. When her employers failed pay her for her labor, she left her job, taking bags with beads and her knowledge as severance pay. Using sewing and beading skills she learned at the factory (a French technique called tambour), Constant started working on her flags. 

Consequently, in the early 1990s Myrlande Constant became the first woman in Haiti to apply the tambour technique to her work, which could be seen as a re-consideration of traditional Voudou flag making. Constructing flags (a masculine symbol) employing a feminine technique, charged her work with notions of gender.

In her works, Constant draws on the back of fabric stretched on wood, while the beading process, what would become the front of the flag, is being formed on the reverse side.

Myrlande works guided by her intuition. She works on the reverse side of the flag to both sketch a preliminary drawing and create her beaded compositions. She does not see the front side of the work until it is finished. An artwork that resembles a Voudou flag that isn’t seen until it is completed becomes an object worked on from the threshold of the visible. This is a symbol that signifies dualities, syncretism, a belief system, a religion, and a stand-in for those notions, all of which are developed, somehow, almost blindly. 

Women, Columns, Names, and Flags

The saying ‘the Potomitan [2] is the woman, the mother, the courage of the family, that which supports the foundations of her universe” (“Le potomitan est la femme, la mère «courage» de famille qui supporte tel un pilier les fondements de son universe”) correlates women and the omnipresent column standing in a Voudou temple, considering them both as centers and connectors. 

In Constant’s work, a type of connector or potomitan appears as a unifying element: her last name.

The name Constant, which is usually sewn in large and contrasting letters becomes a signifier that runs through various scenes as a constant presence, intervening the narratives of the Lwas [3]. Constant includes herself in her scenes, beading a self-portrait of sorts surrounded by her reality. This act of naming and charging her works with her last name brings into focus her viewpoint of Voudou ceremonies, offerings, narratives, and the Lwas’ roles as projections that live within our realm. 

In one of her works, Constant presents naked women on top of horses—deities, riding, mounting people—or figures wearing sun glasses drinking from bottles next to skulls and penises. The ceremonial overlaps with the quotidian and time is addressed as a sum of temporalities while representations interact with each other, developing narratives where sexuality, politics and religion enter the space of naming and law. This is a law that is crossed by the subjective and is always defying temporal vectors, as it happens in magic. Furthermore, in what we call magic—this can also be applied to tradition—what remains unrealized or unfulfilled opens paths where one’s (constant) naming can update historical and personal truths, as well as non-academic but highly categorized types of knowledge, as is the case in Constant’s work.

Myrlande Constant’s praxis, therefore, presents knowledge and representations that address the space of the invisible, expanding the repertoire of faces given to the Lwas in Voudou. Hector Hyppolite was the first artist to give faces to the Lwas.

Andre Pierre followed up on the task. And now Constant is shaping and presenting their faces and actions from a woman’s perspective, working in Port-au-Prince, sewing blindly, from the reverse side of planes, extrapolating techniques to re-address institutionalized ways of approaching highly codified objects and signs.  

Color, Anger, Prohibition

In Voudou, the Rada Lwas originated in Africa; they are generally considered benevolent and associated with the color white. The Petro Iwa appeared in Haiti, and in contrast, are aggressive and associated with the color red. The Ghede Lwa address death and carnality, perform dances, mimic sexual intercourse and behave irreverently; their color is black.

The Rada Lwas are traditionally associated with pre-slavery before the occupation of the symbolic by imperialistic domination. After the Haitian Revolution these deities developed a dark side, signaling anger and oppression or what appears to be another side of their roles. Those roles break through the religious space into the Real as unified totalities. This unification also signals syncretism’s embracing of Catholic saints and a merging with their African counterparts, as well as the political dynamics present in Haiti’s history. (Of note, as mentioned earlier, in Constant’s work, this merging is also evident in the its technical aspect: the beading process uses the French technique called tambourine, which is used for another type of ceremonial garment, the wedding dress, which in turn, re-defines ceremonial Voudou flags.) 

Color in vodou is codified and the relationships established are clear: the dark side of Erzulie Freda is Erzulie Dantor, and cannot—or should not—share the same space with the white side of that Lwa. Their coexistence, although both form the same entity, could generate a type of friction in the realm of the symbolic, unleashing a clash, with repercussions, via the magical, into reality.  

In Voudou, chromatic relationships carry within them functions and tasks. Each Lwa is invoked by a certain veve [4] , they are served certain offerings, shown specific colors, objects, food, chants and drumbeats. The veve, (a sign) used in a ceremony is dependent upon the Lwa whose presence is invoked. If an artwork has a veve in it, it could possess its owner. And if certain deities interact in an artwork, their colors should be considered thoroughly by the artist. Therefore a dual training is required when addressing Voudou in art: not only a formal training is needed, but also an initiation into the religion and its rules, which must be observed as they could impact reality directly, immediately. 

In Constant’s work, moving beyond the traditional appearance of beaded flags and their roles, a questioning and an unleashing of traditional formats takes place. These operations emphasize a distancing from the didactic and the illustrative as her flags present encounters between mythical and contemporary issues such as earthquakes, a woman’s role, social upheaval, sexuality, etc. We should also note that due to the materiality of the work created with the tambour technique, Constant’s work is too stiff to be considered a flag, further separating it from traditional ceremonial flags. 

Self-portraiture, blindness, flags, syncretism, sex, religion, names, etc., are all captured in Myrlande Constant’s flags, shining and moving in her studio. Hers is a praxis open to the outside, released through the feminine gaze from the male-dominated institutions that have instrumentalized naming, religion, art, labor, traditions and roles, constantly, until now. 

Diego Singh, Haiti, 2015 - Miami, 2018

1 Josephson, Nancy, Spirits in Sequins: Voudou Flags of Haiti. pp. 15, Schiffer Books: 2007.

2 Lwas: they are the mysteries, or the invisible ones in Haitian Voudou. They act as links between god and humans. The Lwas are served respecting their culinary, chromatic and sacrificial preferences, and because of these set of specificities, they differ from saints, and can be understood as something else, as projections, or entities that act as shadows or amplifications. The Lwa were syncretized with the Catholic saints by the Fon and the Iwi, and in some cases Catholic saints have become loa, this is the case of John the Baptist. 

3 Potomitan is a pole present in Voudou temples, placed in the center acting as a link between the realms. 

4 Veve are signs used to address and invoke certain Lwas during Voudou ceremonies. A veve is usually drawn on the floor by strewing a powder-like substance, commonly cornmeal, wheat flour, bark, red brick powder, or gunpowder, and the material depends entirely upon the ritual. In Haitian vodou, a mixture of cornmeal and wood ash is used.

February 25th - March 20th, 2018

Opening reception Sunday February 25th, From 6-10 PM

Introduction

In Latin America the Quechuas[1] amount to 10-12 million people. Their language originated in the 5th Century in the central and West areas of what is now Peru. By the 15th century, the Lengua General (General Tongue, the denomination given to the dominant spoken Quechua) was established as the official language in the Inca Empire.

The Quechua language lacks an original written archive and its contemporary structure has been impacted by a myriad of changes, variations, repressions, prohibitions and linguistic mergings (mainly with Spanish and Latin). The first accounts of attempts to establish a written register of the Quechua language date from 1540 by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, a Spanish priest. His writings on Quechua relied on the Latin alphabet and attempted, through phonetic transcriptions, to map a written archive or rather, attempt a translation of the language. He published his Grammatica o Arte de la Lengua General de los Indios de los Reynos del Perú (Grammar or Art of the General Language of the Indians of the Royalty of Peru) in 1560.

In 1608, Diego González Holguín published the Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Perú Llamada Quichua o del Inca, written in Spanish, attempting again to translate and capture the rich nature of Quechua language.[2]

In 1975, Peru became the first country to recognize Quechua as one of its official languages. Ecuador conferred official status on the language in its 2006 Constitution, and in 2009, Bolivia adopted a new Constitution that recognized Quechua and several other indigenous languages as official languages of the country. The major obstacle to the use and teaching of Quechua is the lack of written materials in the language, such as books, newspapers, software, and magazines. The Bible has been translated into Quechua and is distributed by certain missionary groups. Quechua, along with Aymara and other minor indigenous languages, remains essentially a spoken language.

In this text and exhibition, we will, yet again, as we usually do at CENTRAL FINE, deal with the power of language, its impotence, its dictatorial tendencies and its capacity to elude and embrace itself. We will approach Language’s oppression, abstraction and fluidity. We will also observe, although briefly, the Quechua language’s potential to convey tactility, as well as its capacity to bypass imperialistic notions of grammar, readings and their suffocating borders.

Jesus Casimiro

Jesus Casimiro’s textiles are made by a self-devised weaving technique called Cateña that alludes to Luracatao [3], his birth-town. The people in Luracatao are called Cateños, which imbues Casimiro’s weaving approach with a societal texture.

As mentioned earlier, the Quechua language lacks a unified and autonomous written archive and has therefore relied mainly on oral transmission and a codification of phonetics, grammatical structures, patterns, weaving techniques, symbolism, world views, and what appears to be or look like ‘abstraction’ for its preservation and dissemination.

A key aspect in this exhibition is the role of color in the Quechua language and traditions. Color has been codified and charged, specifically in a way that conveys a vast array of associations, concepts, ideas. Put together in this way, colors can and do narrate stories.

Let’s take a look at this: The Quechua spoken in Salta (Argentina) differs from the Quechua spoken in Jujuy (Argentina), Peru, Bolivia, etc. What these variations share is an attempt at codifying society and nature through practices, what we call art, forms, colors, symbols, visual patterns and the mythological. In short: In the arts, abstract signs are preserved by the Quechuas as means of livelihood, communication, integration, and preservation of the identity of an oppressed and silenced group of people.

Such abstractions, far from being part of the ‘empty signs of abstraction’ or mere formalism, will show up in patterns, ceramic objects, choice of materials, as ways to comprehend the symbolic, the imaginary and the real as one.

Casimiro’s body of work takes on the tradition of Quechua textiles and moves through its parameters weaving a personal approach that distances itself from what we understand as craft. This way, it enters perhaps what we call contemporary art, and in that resistance to the stratification of tradition, his praxis meets what we could see as Op-art, abstraction, etc.

His weaving technique, (devised, developed and named by Casimiro), deals with political, sociological, historical and religious problems.

Casimiro’s work then touches on the notion of Origin, the Original, etc. How? Well, the name of his invented weaving process (‘Cateña’) refers to the name given to the people born in his native Luracatao. Casimiro's origins are at stake here as well as the original ways of ancestral traditions in textile-making. Or the invention of one’s weaving, of one’s intersection within a sum of political and social knots and fibers.

Determined by color and its associations, Casimiro organizes his textiles in a chromatic lexicon pertinent to the Quechua culture, establishing linguistic relationships. In the symbolism and the codification of color in Quechua textiles, Red embodies a type of wisdom that is self-evident to the eye and a lack of red indicates times of peace. Green will point to agriculture, fauna, flora, and the contact with the Mother Earth or Pacha Mama, and so forth. White signals a type of intellectual labor, clarity of observation, a type of serene objectivity and the base of reality. Black stands for Time. Purple stands for Social Organization (Ayllu).

Casimiro’s works tell an “unwritten” story through pattern and color, while remaining specific and open-ended. His works are abstract textiles built on a codification of color that could be read by the Quechuas. To us, they remain sustained in themselves, communicating a sum of associations vastly different from the stories they carry.

In the work Rio, a bulging Black, blue and red textile undulates as a River. This river, with its red knots, is a sick river running through time, indicating pollution as blood as well as its impact on agriculture, explains Casimiro.

In Kenko, we see a 3D woven pattern that represents the trajectory of routes surrounding the mountains in Salta, Argentina. Those paths, with their sharp quebradas (breakages) are the routes that the Quechuas must walk in order to work or to return home after work. This is a story narrated in lines of color, involving the sun, the topography of mountains, labor, etc.

In Paisaje Telurico (Telluric Landscape), a free standing textile is pierced by threads or rays of colored wool coming down from the ceiling that cross what looks like a group of valleys and mountains that expand onto the floor. This landscape is seen floating between the ground and the sky, sustained by the codification of color and threads, knotted in a chain of associations that point to a continuum of signifiers.

This is key to understanding the Quechua point of view: What we call the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are all interconnected and unified in a thread that considers them all, as one.

Casimiro’s body of work presents a body of language under the oppressive force of dominant bodies, tongues and grammatical structures. His textiles are constructions and planes of resistance that, through the use of what we read as abstraction, provide avenues for sustaining themselves in a poetic space, that is in turn, an actor, a witness and an archive to a worldview by a large and silenced group of people. This ‘silence’ is cryptic (to us) and yet vibrant, defiant, charged by symbols, labor, mythologies. This ‘silence’ exists as protest, as tradition, as a Chaya[4]], manifesting what survives and thrives as a speech that is alive, changing, unwritten, permeable, and clear.

Diego Singh, Miami, 2018.

Jesus Casimiro was born in 1968 in Luracatao, Salta, Argentina. His works have been exhibited widely in Argentina and abroad. He is considered one of the great textile artists in the country. A selection of his numerous exhibitions include Pushka in Time, at the Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires and Latin American Textile Artists, Museo Nacional de Etnografia, La Paz, Bolivia. In Salta, his textiles have been shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes, House of Arias Rengell and the Museo Latinoamericano. Casimiro was awarded the prestigious Acquisition Prize at the National Biennial of Textile Artists in Argentina and was selected as the awardee in the exhibition Contemporary Art and Textiles at the Museo Nacional de Etnografia in La Paz, Bolivia. He has also participated a juror for textile arts at the Auchan Center in Lille, France.

On March 7th, Casimiro will present a publication on his work titled Arte Calchaqui, in conjunction with the exhibition Escultura Mutante at the department of Cultural Affairs at la Casa de Salta in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is his first solo exhibition in the United Sates and at CENTRAL FINE.

[i]Quechua: (/ˈkɛtʃuə/, in ame also /ˈkɛtʃwⱭː/)[4], known as runa simi ("people's language"). The Quechua language, is an indigenous language family, with variations spoken by the Quechuas primarily living in the Andes and highlands of South America. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widely spoken language of indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of some 10-12 million speakers. Approximately 25% (7.7 million) of Peruvians speak some variation of Quechua. It is perhaps most widely known for being the main language of the Inca empire. The colonizers initially encouraged its use, but from the middle of their reign they suppressed it. However, Quechua ultimately survived, and variants are still widely spoken today.

[ii] González Holguín, Diego: Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada quichua o del inca. See downloadable pdf here:

[iii] Luracatao: a village and rural municipality in the Salta province in northwestern Argentina.

[iv] Chaya: the Chaya implies a strong reaction against imperialistic tendencies, aiming to protest and to preserve marginalized cultural manifestations. Traditionally, the Chaya, is delivered as a protest in an oblique way: by poeticizing nature, financial need, or addressing imperialistic abuse and racism, political issues are expressed via the camouflage of the voice and music, in songs, in the northwest of Argentina. 

January 14-February 23, 2018 

Opening Sunday Jan 14th, from 5-8 PM
 
CENTRAL FINE presents Inside the Brick by Christoph Westermeier. This is his first solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE and his second presentation in Miami Beach, after a one-night performance at Between Arrival & Departure, Miami Beach in 2017.

The works at CENTRAL FINE bring to mind a mise en abyme, reflecting images within images, at once hermetic and generic, defined by cuts and filters; as if entering the multiple structures of a nightmare, where perception swallows itself, blind and deaf, full of id.

This is a dangerous dream and Westermeier walks and walls us through it, signaling the abyss of the brick, its depth, and our tendency to self-exile and isolation. Perhaps the liquidity of the brick (like the liquidity of the word, or the eye) solidifies blinding masks that indicate simultaneous temporalities and shape-shifting facades.

Pockets, legs, pillows, doors, green malachite, the brick on a maligned intimacy, and the immersion into what sketches power and its structures; are all called upon in a poetic move, carving out a tiny hole?

–Diego Singh 

‘Inside the brick’ stands for a discussion between a flâneur and objects in a Potemkin village. The flâneur is detached from time and space and walks secluded on a horizontal line. He is in close contact with Siegfried Kracauer, W. G. Sebald and Daphne du Maurier. His points of reference are the objects he encounters, which he sees as accomplices on his tours. In these objects, the flâneur finds friends who help him to enter society: an ashtray is his ticket to a late roman banquet as well as his constant companion on cruising tours through Vatican city or a handy helper in Napoleon III second empire.

Power structures are the counterparts the flâneur has to deal with. While his true friend Jean Des Esseintes (“À rebours”, Joris-Karl Huysmans) turned away from reality, the flâneur made a deal with power structures: realizing that rational organs experience his dialogue with objects only as a monologue he moved on to a Potemkin village. In this illusory world the insides of bricks have the same narrative power as paintings by Niele Toroni. While power structures keep vertical control of this construction, the flâneur remains on his horizontal tour, talking to paper, walking through a propaganda show by el Lissitzky and listening to Shostakovich music.

–Christoph Westermeier, Dusseldorf, 2017-2018. 

Christoph Westermeier (b. 1984, Cologne) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf / Academy of Fine Arts 2004- 2010 in Dusseldorf (2004–2008 with Prof. Thomas Ruff and Benjamin Katz/Albrecht Fuchs; 2008–2010 with Prof. Rita McBride and Prof. Christopher Williams, master student of Prof. Christopher Williams in 2009) and attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2011 until 2013. His awards and grants include Moscow residency, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (2016); Schloss Ringenberg residency (2015); Istanbul residency, Kunststiftung NRW (2014); Förderpreis NRW (2013); Working grant Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn (2013); dHCS Scholarship, Kunstverein Dusseldorf (2011); Peter-Mertes-Scholarship, Kunstverein Bonn (2010); Meisterschüler of Christopher Williams (2009).

Westermeier has presented solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Bonn, Bonn; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf ; Thebaïs, Cologne; Between Arrival & Departure, Miami Beach; Kunststiftung NRW, Istanbul; Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam; Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions and performances at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, with E. Hermann, A. Pöhlmann, F. Rohden Düsseldorf; Villa Romana, Florence; and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, among others.

October 22nd -November 21st, 2017

Opening Sunday, 22nd from 7-10 PM

The ground is here and panic and anxiety dance around, freezing arms and legs, preparing us to fight... when one faints, wings have grown and our “upper bodies” have morphed into lions, tigers, and bears—who fly.

Viktor El-Saieh presents paintings where various subjects of worship, from the iconic idea to the spiritual figure, live in a state of...

His paintings attest to a certain solidarity between the feral, the poetic and the human. The character’s actions are silent, apparitions are themselves, while planes of color and negative spaces (fighting each other out) amplify a vitraux.

Anxiety defines us through conflict, in-forming us; and when facing it, we come to terms with oppression, violence and choice, grasping how this meeting morphs us into versions.

The dizziness that El-Saieh talks about, is, in his words, “attempt at understanding the relationship between folklore and culture through the lens of mythology and its potential application in daily life.”

He adds, “I try to highlight the commonality of the human experience as a way into myself... maybe my background has led me to tap into a plane where the mythological is the breeding ground for a tendency toward hyper-subjectivity and infinite possibility, and everything is probable, in the sense that everything has already happened, much like in a dream—but devoid of emotion. Every scenario you might ever imagine has already taken place and the outcomes are immune to any sort of outlook, which leads to a type of neutrality.”

Building on the artist’s previous body of work (which examined, in depth, the narrative of a very particular figure in

Haitian political-mythology called Chaloska1, these paintings seek to address the notion of the individual and the value of the symbolic, right now, when choice is abundant and incredibly limited. By taking as a given that every discourse is poiesis, El-Saieh can cross thresholds and categorization, touching their stratification.

Viktor El-Saieh actively trespasses some mainstream perceptions of history when suggesting an alternative, as if he says “I am not what I am”2 ; looking at “the contemporary” and facing his, and painting’s potency as well as shared patterns of anticipatory anxiety.

Diego Singh, 2017

Viktor El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1988. He has a BA in international affairs from the University of Miami and studied painting at the André Pierre Studio in Port-au-Prince. His work has been exhibited at Locust Projects, Miami; David Castillo Gallery, Miami; CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; and El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among others.

This is Viktor El-Saieh’s second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Chaloska: a political/military figure from the early 1900s infamous for murdering political prisoners and immortalized as a sinister carnival character with a large red mouth.

2 Borges, Jorge Luis: ‘everything and nothing’ short story in Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1999.

September 24th – October 20 2017.

Opening Sunday, September 24 from 6-10 PM

There’s a movie I cannot remember, that comes back as a sensation. I wonder if we can send an open invitation and ask what movie it is. (I’m worried about my memory. There’s very little timeline there.) Basically, I have an image of a creator doing something and simultaneously there’s another character undoing the same thing the first is making. Both figures unknown to each other, focused on their task, their actions work inversely toward each other, building toward their own ends, and at the same time negating each other.

The characters in the movie that you can’t remember bring to mind the Demiurge 1 . The son of Sophia (knowledge) emerges as a creator, translating into the realm of the material the world of ideas. He acts like a distorting mirror, blind, monstrous, some views considered him evil. Just like surveillance mirrors, he is seen as a distorter figure, but also as a creator, an artist, an interpreter.

The title, ‘Shredder’ invokes him, as the Demiurge is driven by, or is the id itself, passive aggressively reflecting and producing, unaware of his task. Pure pulsion and act. And as translations go, what the Demiurge reflects, is flawed, but that flaw is the surplus.

We can also think about the Lacanian task of doing and working with the excision that castration brings. Reality warped by it, bending us and, in that space of ‘lacking’ we find the emphasis on links that you talk about. We are a ‘lack’, and that void is the link between A-B-C. The excision becomes our material in itself, and an agent.

Love the idea of working alone, unmonitored, ignorant of everything else, even the mother. Well, we end up with the divine triumvirate of the 3 C’s (the Creator, the Creature and the Created). The shredder/ mirror/ artist/ id/ Demiurge can be thought of as the 3C’s—in these bulging ideas we always find the pregnancy of dots. There are toothed mouths/stomachs shining on the walls of the bay supermarket around the corner, an office, condo, etc. One looks invariably fatter there, improved.

In this exhibition your work performs a type of self-effacement. These surfaces are inscribed with random paragraphs, with shapes that look like graffiti, bringing the outside (the graffiti) into the private sphere of the mirror, changing the scale of the writing on the wall, re-presenting that sign, and in turn, occluding the gaze and the reflected. Mirrors without the other are objects that are dis-annexed, leeching on whatever, needy and passive-aggressive.

When we talk about your memory loss, are we talking about a generational issue or the early onset of dementia?

I’m worried. People don’t remember much anymore, you can search the web for what doesn’t make the cut of memory. We can crowd-source memory and ask the other to fill in the blanks. The more we can do this, the less we remember, obviously.

Perhaps because of the title of the exhibition, each mark you’ve made is shredding what emerges as language. One encounters a running line that stifles the democracy of reflections (or the lack of both). And whatever comes forward becomes noise, obstruction: a sign unleashed, unraveling beyond grammar, beyond language itself and becoming a thing. Or perhaps we meet in these surfaces, that are links and limits, an omnipresent mother regulating it all (Sophia), pregnant with the Demiurge. Delivering what reflects and distorts you. Sporting a reflecting belly, utterly charged with whatever crosses them.

Yes, the etching reduces that reflection by degrees with each marking; so, the reflection is reduced incrementally through the hand.

By degrees, I insist here, as these mirrors have a 160 degree field of view. They are and have a gloved sight, (enveloped, covered) they close-in on the filter. The audience adds something to that experience but the mirrors and the sculpture ‘chew’ away that input.

The mark/division becomes clear and concrete, fraying the reflection, opening a wound. Anything put in front of these works will not be rendered intact. This halving of the gaze cannot be held in documentation: we can’t photograph or film or pause these encounters or what they bring forward, this is a machine, precarious, and over-determined.

Here is repression.

(in italics, Kyle Chapman), July 14th, 2017

Text by Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2017

Kyle Chapman (b. Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Miami. Chapman studied interdisciplinary practice and fiber arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and painting at New World School of the Arts. His solo project Channel is currently on view at the Bass Museum of Art’s temporary contemporary program in partnership with Walgreens at 2300 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida.

This is Kyle Chapman’s second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Demiurge; one gnostic mythos refers to him as the son of Sophia (wisdom/knowledge). In Platonic, Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean the Demiurge is an artisan/like figure responsible for the fashioning of the universe. We are interested in the tension that the gnostic approach to the term presents; as the Demiurge is considered as antagonistic to the will of the supreme being. His act of creation occurs in an unconscious way, flawed. The Demiurge is then, a solution to the problem of evil , since he is the creator of a separation, of versions or of a reflection that is unleashed from its source.

December 3rd, 2016 - March 30th, 2017

Opening December 3rd, from 7-9 PM

CENTRAL FINE presents an exhibition of paintings by André Pierre, curated by Tomm El-Saieh and Diego Singh. On view there will be a selection of historical works that aims to further the conversation on the place where the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real meet.

André Pierre was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1916. An anecdote told by Emmanuel El-Saieh narrates a traumatic moment or perhaps an epiphany: Pierre wrestled from a pig a piece of sugarcane to feed himself. This moment underlines an engagement with his own drive and the animal’s. It could perhaps be thought of as the Lacanian “lightning” where things become clear and actualized in consciousness as if by lightning, ultimately modifying one’s life. Shortly after, Pierre became a farmer, a painter and a voodoo priest, and perhaps understood the site where the human, hunger, and the divine merge—through libidinal sublimation.

Pierre’s first steps into painting took place within the voodoo temples; his early works were painted in the gourds and used to contain the offerings/ feedings/ sacrifices to the loa1 . These works were seen by Maya Deren2 who introduced him to the Centre d’Art in the late 40s. Following her suggestion, Pierre began painting on canvas and board, which perhaps indicates a passage from the devotional nature of his practice to a market conscious output.

When approaching Pierre’s works we encounter narratives that are embodied by deities, for a lack of a better word, or what is brought forward as these stories cut through the threshold of “the Real”. In one work, a mermaid-like figure (La Sirene) is seen as a sign announcing a flood, a political scene and a fight. The painting acts as an incantation where the artist conjures a spell, piercing a veil, presenting a work that acts as a rite and as a representation. (This twofold aspect indicates the shared nature of representation and the ritual: both invoke and re-attach through form and language, the real and the symbolic.) When considering these works, one wonders if Pierre saw the religious and the political as the same.

Going back to the loa, it is important to understand that the loa are not deities per-se, but rather can be understood as shadows or projections broadcasting their qualities onto this plane. These projections interact with humans, embodying virtues, tasks, and desires. The priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms, re-linking them. This is key to understanding André Pierre’s work: through painting he brings forward the avatars of the divine into the reality of Haiti and its political landscape, confusing them and populating the shrine and the battlefield with metaphors and spells.

André Pierre’s reality was informed and formed by voodoo, and what we see in his paintings is an interaction between “the symbolic” and “the imaginary” (representation and language) through re-presentations that shape his painting practice and his work as a priest. The ‘passage to act’, and to the act of painting, in Pierre’s work evolves into a moment where the symbolic realm is that which informs, while becoming an image, a reality. This circular relationship is often addressed when talking about magical thinking. The tendency towards a trafficking of signs, towards repetition and codification present in Haitian painting and in Pierre’s works seems to address not only formal tactics and traditions but also the tempo that defines a trance and a rite. Such rhythm is the very site where narratives become acts.

What is of interest to me is that the focus in Pierre’s work appears to reside on intention; and this is what defines the magician. Pierre, perhaps, experienced intention as a site, and in that ‘place’ a color will invoke an effect, a spell, or point to a political structure. In the

works presented in this exhibition, André Pierre’s language and gaze seem to be delivering a living script that is defined by the same

threshold that this enactment is constantly crossing.

Diego Singh, Miami; October 25, 2016.

Andre Pierre was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1916; he died in 2005 at his home in Croix-des-Missions. His works focus on the representation of loa, or deities in the voodoo pantheon. He painted at the Issa El-Saieh gallery in Port-au-Prince for over 21 years, eventually becoming a houngan (a male voodoo priest) and dedicating his life to painting and to the presentation of voodoo as a legitimate religion. He is considered one of Haiti’s most significant painters and a successor of Hector Hyppolite, as a major painter of the loa. His work has been exhibited internationally in various museums, most recently at the Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles and El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince.

CENTRAL FINE thanks Tomm El-Saieh, Sharona Nathan El-Saieh and Emmanuel El-Saieh for their guidance on this exhibition.

1 loa: the mysteries, or the invisibles in Haitian voodoo. They act as links between god and man. Unlike Catholic saints, not only revered but also served and offered food and sacrifices, respecting their culinary or chromatic preferences. As such, they are close to humans, and perhaps can be understood as projections. The loa were syncretized with the catholic saints by the Fon and the Iwi and in some instances Catholic saints have become loa; this is the case of John the Baptist.

2 Le Centre d’Art was founded in 1944 in Port-au-Prince. It has been an educational center and a reference for the presentation of Haitian art. In January 12, 2010, Le Centre d’Art’s building collapsed. After the collapse of the building and the death of its director, the site remained closed for four years. Le Centre d’Art reopened in 2014 and remains open. 

June 5 – July 10, 2016

Opening on Sunday, June 5 from 4-9PM

“Charles Oscar Etienne was the head of the national police [in Haiti] during the presidency of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam who was the 7th president to hold office between the period of 1911–1915. Sam was overthrown and Charles Oscar murdered 150 political prisoners immediately, just before he himself was brutally murdered. The U.S. occupation of Haiti soon followed and it would last until 1934. I am not sure when but eventually Charles Oscar became ‘Chaloska’ and he emerged as a character in the Haitian Carnival—particularly in the southern town of Jacmel.”

Viktor El-Saieh’s first solo show at CENTRAL FINE could perhaps show a painter/dreamer that observes the dramatic act of dreaming/painting. The painter here is an actor that unfolds into a script-writer, a performer, a narrator and a character. Just like in a dream, where there’s no end and no beginning1 , the work moves from historical events into poetic re-presentations of what happened through the lens of fiction and commentary. ‘Tet chat (cat’s head)’ is a slang phrase in Haiti used to describe something unfinished, or in a state of becoming (perhaps something poorly assembled, at risk of falling apart). This precarious assemblage—like interpretation and memory, and their gaps, lagoons and parentheses—faces us with painting as an act that interweaves its own history within a vast network of associations (political, poetic, art-historical, etc.). Moreover, the title points to a relationship with nature, which predominantly appears in Haitian painting, signaling the link between man, myth, and nature as a given.

The role of the painter as a script-director and a career-driven politician brings to mind the current state of affairs where paternal figures have fallen and a new type of archetypical sign appears: the monster appealing to violence, to emotions and the eradication of reason (understanding this as the cliché of seeing reason as an offspring of paternal predominance). Of note here, and moving beyond the narrative, we see El-Saieh’s works as a series of positions that address painting’s status through a ‘landscape’. Painting here is acutely aware of its capacity to act as a performative-political text and to embody the drama involved in its making. Painting, like Chaloska, could be an avatar that is sustained in a threshold where its relevance is no longer discussed, where its allegorical, visual and political power imbues every texture and form with the forces that meet on the picture plane.

Chaloska the agitator, the criminal, is a monstrous footnote in these canvases, and embodies what El-Saieh calls, “the capacity for violent explosion that Haiti holds within.” Chaloska, the zombie, preternaturally alive as a recurrent figure in the Haitian Carnival, is a medium here, a channel and a quotation on violence that holds a built-in criticism directed towards its core and the conditions that generated it. This can be extrapolated to the state of criticism collapsing into the surface of painting, reflecting on the medium and its pulse as an effect of that meeting.

With criticality built-in, painting, like Chaloska, could be a medium kept alive beyond politically driven death-proclamations. This super-charged drama is enacted by a sensitive use of color and the activation of negative spaces and their tension, presenting a mise-en-scène where narration evokes the monstrous and moves beyond nostalgic commemorations straight into the scene of the painter as a director of relationships and as a magnifier of their forces.

Diego Singh, Miami, May, 2016.

Viktor El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1988. He has a BA in international affairs from the University of Miami and studied painting at the André Pierre Studio in Port-au-Prince. His work has been exhibited at Locust Projects, Miami; David Castillo Gallery, Miami; and El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, among others.

This is Viktor El-Saieh’s first solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

1 Madonna and Patrick Leonard: “Like a Prayer,” Like a Prayer, Sire Records, March 3, 1989.

Jesus Casimiro, Kyle Chapman, Tomm El-Saieh, and Maria Quispe

May 22 – June 4, 2016

Opening on Sunday, May 22 from 4-8PM

The car took me into a street where trees merged into a claw becoming one million screens. Perhaps the liquidity of mirrors calls for something beyond reflections multiplied ad-infinitum and the silver plane is where the engraving of texts, notes and scribbles can signal indelibly scattered thoughts, lists, etc. As if the malleability of the mirror stands for a perfect dictionary, where all thoughts are contained and registered, doubled, and like encyclopedic efforts, carved.

Kyle Chapman’s works engage with what appears to be veiled. In a recent series of engraved mirrors, Chapman tattoos the transparent and manages to double that mark through reflections. It is in the act of puncturing the ‘veil’ the one that brings forward an activity focused on itself and on the dissent towards the hyperventilation of self-imposed transparencies or the reflection’s policing of the self. The series presented in this exhibition addresses linguistic and narrative interests, drawing, and a journalistic drive; while remaining skeptical of the possibilities that language can afford, relying on the capacity of the mirror to present a constantly shifting ground capturing the work in its totality as an unfixed entity.

Jesus Casimiro’s work seems to point that when a tapestry becomes a text, a codified note about the outside, we can expect a language that is hermetic and soft to the touch. His works emerge and address the Quechua language, a language without a written archive that evolves via visual coding and oral tradition. Following this strong correlation between the linguistic and its material manifestations, his tapestries are made by a self-devised weaving technique called Cateña that alludes to Luracatao, his birth-town. The people in Luracatao are called Cateños, which imbues Casimiro’s weaving approach with a societal texture. Let’s take a look at this tight-knit bond: the Quechua spoken in Salta, Argentina is markedly different from the spoken Quechua in Jujuy, Peru, Bolivia, etc. What these dialects share is abstraction and an attempt at codifying society and nature through symbols, visual patterns and the mythological, as the Quechua language lacks any written preservation.

Abstract signs are maintained as a means of livelihood, communication, and integration. Such abstraction, far from being part of the ‘empty signs of abstraction’ or paternal formalism, shows up in patterns, ceramic objects, choice of materials... as ways to comprehend the symbolic and the imaginary as the Real, as opposed to perceiving them in separate planes.

Casimiro’s works then, take on the tradition of Quechua textiles and move beyond its parameters, weaving his idiosyncrasy into Pop art, Opt-art and obsession. Determined by color and its associations, Casimiro organizes his tapestries in a chromatic lexicon establishing meditative relationships: white signals a type of intellectual labor, a clarity of observation, a type of serene objectivity; purple stands for social organization (ayllu); red embodies a type of wisdom that is self-evident to the eye; green will point to agriculture, fauna, flora and the contact with the mother earth or Pachamama, and so forth. It is as if his tapestries tell an unwritten story through pattern and color while remaining specific and fluid.

Maria Quispe’s work addresses not being anywhere and being of the everywhere, acting on isolation in her remote Escoipe in Salta. In her practice, it is as if the songs, newspaper-clips and the political activism that inform her works become cyphers. One wonders if this political stance towards abstraction is happy with parody or with an actual re-shaping of the political. In her protest poems and songs, Quispe engages in a re-sensitization of the visual through actual dissent.

At the core of her practice is the chayai, which usually implies a reaction to imperialistic tendencies and a preservation of marginalized cultural manifestations. Traditionally, the chaya is delivered as a protest in an oblique way. By poeticizing nature and needs, issues are addressed via the camouflage of the voice and music, which leaves one thinking: ‘wow, that’s so beautiful’, to then realize what is broken via the violence of progress.

Tomm El-Saieh’s paintings consider a certain Haitian-ness, rhythmical-all-over abstraction and a political approach that implies a simultaneous engagement/distancing from the perceptions and the pictorial traditions of his country. From his generation, he is Haiti’s first painter addressing high modernist ideals and its dislocation from his pictorial heritage. Understanding abstraction as a political act is what links his work with Quispe’s work, aesthetically and conceptually.

El Saieh’s works, with its associations moving beyond the retinal, bring forward a complex weaving that announces that perhaps a filtering takes place in these paintings, an extraction of what comprises the very basic look of Haiti, its temperature and vibe remaining latent and potent. El-Saieh perhaps claims a stance in the formless, in the ground that is being developed by his own charting, a ground where tradition and its castrating impetus is faced by its own cut.

1Chaya, in this sense chayar is an act of singing praises to nature, expecting for rain, food, space and peace. It is prevalent in many Diaguita and Quechua populations and is a covert way of protesting imperialism and capitalistic/industrial take over.

December 1st, 2015- January 3rd, 2016

Opening December 3rd, from 6-9PM

October 11 – November 18

Opening Sunday, October 11 from 4:30-9PM

Abandonment in this exhibition is understood in associative layers. To ban is to prohibit, and is also related to banishment, or something cast out. Civic life is in essence defined by its prohibitions. A ban is spatial, a designation within a territory. In a totalitarian-leaning democracy, the experience of having a body is an experience of being necessarily healthy or of being easily erased.

The aromatherapy of hospitals, family offices and shrines all impregnate a self-cannibalistic tendency that amplifies a type of impotence/potency. Here the perfect image of disease is autoimmune. A key aspect of this ‘health’, in its legally required form, is that those motherfuckers still make you pay.

In the exhibition Michael Jackson appears as a sign where The King (basileus) mirrors the Holy basil[1] both being ‘the incomparable one’. The transformation of MJ’s body in his lifetime is also seen as giving the body to the polis, becoming Christ-like: A body transformed and abandoned, a body with a collapsing nose, a body to eat from (Liturgically and through mass-media), a body that is given to us and that, by losing itself, or re-defining itself, keeps us waiting for its return.

This is Sam Lipp’s first exhibition at Central Fine. The exhibition will be followed later this month by a second presentation at Central Fine, Buenos Aires. Sam Lipp (B. 1989) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include I Am An American Citizen, I Know My Rights, atNeochrome, Turin, Italy; and My Hamster Cage at, Bodega, NY. He is a co-director of Queer Thoughts (with Luis Miguel Bendaña), a contemporary art gallery in NYC.

[1]Holy basil is a plant. It is originally from India and is used in Ayurvedic medicine as an “adaptogen” to counter life’s stresses. It is considered a sacred plant by the Hindus and is often planted around Hindu shrines. The Hindu name for holy basil, Tulsi, means "The Incomparable One." Medicine is made from the leaves, stems, and seeds.

Lucila Garcia de Onrubia, Viktor El-Saieh and Richard Spit

September 20 – October 8, 2015

Opening on September 20 from 4:30-9PM

Central Fine presents a group show where free-association, visibility and loss face links and margins.

Lucila Garcia de Onrubia’s work is fluidly planted between hysteria and obsession while addressing the arbitrariness of those terms. The works presented in GAIN fold back and forth into design, into jewelry, into stages, and it seems that Garcia de Onrubia stands pro-et-contra the violence performed by genres and their divisive nature.

Instead of proposing arrivals, Garcia de Onrubia researches a type of liquidity and passive-aggressiveness, allowing for a look into the tensions between the material and the invisible. In her works, the gap between categories is an activator of the liminal, and that activator focuses on itself, or on the tension that is inherent in the notion of definition. It is in the zooming-into-things where her works bypass the censorship of form and material, confronting themselves through a set of semantic suspensions.  

Like Garcia de Onrubia’s work, Viktor El-Saieh seems to be part of a generation of artists that appeals to free-association and what we can call ‘the surrealist method’ as a strategy that allows for various interests to materialize through sampling. This retake on pictorial tactics that appeared in the 90’s (i.e. Michel Majerus, Markus Oehlen, Albert Oehlen) shares the DJing approach of its predecessors, but, rather than bringing together disparate elements, El-Saieh offers a narrative that emerges from what we can call the symbolic coating of the political and the perception of “The National”. This symbolic patina, or Haitian-ness acts like a unifying force that erases time, places and actors and emphasizes links rather than punctuations. In that sense, Viktor El-Saieh’s works share a formal equivalence with musical scores, where negative space can be understood as ‘silence’ and the defining factor in any composition. Although politically aware, his paintings are determined by gaps and holes between form and content, and it is in these absences where their agency exists beyond the narrative and its ideologies.

Richard Spit’s work appeals to a similar psychoanalytic approach. Through this associative methodology he addresses urgent issues such as the current state of the medical system, power structures, lack of infrastructure and the instrumentalization of identity politics.  By presenting the ready-made, again coated by the symbolic as material, Spit charges his paintings and sculptures with decentralization and abstraction. What we gain/lose is contained in a generic and yet, uncanny ‘shape’. This Das Ding[1] (The Thing, the repressed) finally surfaces and what appears isn’t revealed, but rather remains as an opaque sign that threatens to unfold into its own ambivalence.

[1] Das Ding: Freud introduces the term as “The Thing’ which exists in the id and presents itself as the unimaginable, that which exists beyond Language, see: Freud, Sigmund. "The Unconscious", 19l5e. SE XIV, 161. Lacan, on the other side, argues that the nature of the subconscious is linguistic, and separates Das Ding drom Die Sache, as Das Ding remains the real in itself, the unknowable; and Die Sache is the representation of ‘The Thing’ in the symbolic order, see:  Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p. 62-3, 44-5

August 20 – September 15, 2015

Opening: Thursday, August 20 from 6 - 9PM

I went to the market: the usual, tea and lentils, and why am I texting anything, I mean this opacity, and sometimes the monologue emerges like a joke in Coptic and I’m not an expert. I also thought that maybe you could restore that phantasmatic veil, the one that at some point was lost. Strange, I lost the phantom and I gained a ghost. I’m heading to analysis now and I’ll try and bring something from the Kosher market on 41st, and we will continue devouring the sunglasses you lost, the brick wall that merged with the floor without falling, flattening a translucent green man as a lettuce sandwiched between tiles and bricks. Access, access, a letter that begs for access. A letter is a far cry, in a way. And maybe a crucial triangle between the Threatened Word1, the Etymology of Passions2 and The Happy Apocalypses3. Somehow, the battlefield is anonymous, there’s no face, no image reigning. A battlefield as a gesture and a container at once, not being one or the other, that is, Kyle, what I think is happening here. If the pages of the gallery continue to turn into windows, then each move and countermove must avoid what is merely reactive, so, each gesture that is planned increases a displacement in the game. And we may not see the Store Experience Manager, but we can see the hysteric shop that houses your painted films through the glass bouncing us. What has been flattened trough the window is a sum of letters that you’ve collected and their exhaustion is exactly what you are protecting. Perhaps the exhaustion is a fruit, the fruit of a thousand codes that present the text with the possibility of its very own anxiety?

Diego Singh, Normandy Isles, 2015.

About the Artist:

Kyle Chapman was born in South Africa. He has studied Interdisciplinary Practice and Fiber Manipulation at the Kansas City Art Institute and at New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at “A Certain Sensitivity” at Space Mountain, 2014; Mythmaker at Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City, 2010 and Liminal Obitus at Scope Miami 2006. His first solo show will be held at Central Fine, Miami Beach.

Notes:

1.-Bordelois Ivonne: La Palabra Amenazada: Libros del Zorzal, Buenos Aires, 2003.
2.-Bordelois Ivonne: La Etimologia de las Pasiones, Libros del Zorzal, Buenos Aires, 2007.
3.-Bordelois Ivonne: El Alegre Apocalipsis, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires,1995.

March 29 – May 4, 2015

Opening Sunday, March 29, 2015 from 4-9PM

CENTRAL FINE presents Ant’s Tits, Tomm El-Saieh’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition title refers to a Haitian proverb that indicates: with patience, one can see an ant’s tits. Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince in 1984. As a child he studied painting and trained with local painters in the area, understanding rhythm, color, and pattern as structural forces that have the potential to charge a surface beyond the visual. He observed narratives in the works of his teachers, that ranged from the religious and the political to the touristic. Growing up in Haiti as the son of a Haitian-Palestine father and an Israeli mother, El-Saieh faced a sense of removal from his societal experience in Port-au-Prince, a removal that enhanced the perception that one could be part of a pertinent group while not fully participating in it. As he points out: “I cannot talk for Haitians, or Israelis or Palestinians. I need to address those backgrounds from a place of neutrality, from a place of abstraction. I need to look at those conflicting grounds and understand them as political and pictorial backgrounds in tension.” Eventually, this looking at the look of things became a defining aspect in El-Saieh’s body of work. When addressing the look of traditional Haitian painting (identifiable by dots and marks, color, rhythm and over-determination in paint application) and eliminating any trace of narrative content, he concentrates on the possibilities of that very state of removal/abstraction that is lived as intrinsic.

In the “Ant’s Tits” paintings, what is clear is that traditional Haitian flat color application has been replaced by a superimposition of transparencies and that narratives are cancelled by a stream of marks or punctuations that overlap and present all-over surfaces, all-over points of view in a dry and specific way, retaining a highly meditative vibe as if painted in a trance.

Those transparencies, might also be read as a set of integrated and yet independent ways of addressing states of conflict, race, voodoo, or say, nations and their idiosyncrasies, tensions, colors, etc.—all acting as interdependent filters that take into account their self-reflective capacity.

Abstraction, as it its understood by Modernism is largely missing in the history of Haitian painting. And this gap moved El-Saieh to develop a critical approach to the term and its manifestation in his works, an approach that somehow updates Haitian painting’s tradition and look while investigating attention as a major focus or drive, a concept that is researched by many of his contemporaries. We can say that, right now, this vantage point is evident when zooming into things, or is compulsively embodied in the attempt to observe and try to see the ant’s tits.

Moreover, today, the notion of attention seems to constantly redefine itself as a generational symptom driven by an extreme focus and a scattered or all-encompassing scope. An enhanced emphasis on observation, at once diagnosed as ADHD and all-over-the place, perhaps signals attention as a currency, and this currency is one that insists on placing itself as a link within the links that we upload and inhabit.

One can also say that an ADHD wandering eye and its chemical-induced focus retain a level of ambivalence towards the notions of time, speed and space, and re-engage through a liberation from the burden of progress. In that sense, modernist aspirations for progress and the ineffable are now scattered: fast/slow and Adderall-fueled modes of image production-consumption with an emphasis on the generic or the decentralized. What emerges then is a type of abstraction, one that retains a degree of specificity and fluidity that allows for transparencies to affect each other, slow down, or speed each other up. And this insistence is one of the elements that Tomm El-Saieh brings forward in his meticulous paintings.

It seems to me that Tomm’s interest in fabric design and patterns, t-shirts, pointillism, all-over abstraction, Haitian-ness, or his grandfather’s voodoo-jazz orchestra all converge to present a politically charged merging of sorts while considering attention as a currency, firmly floating over the ant’s armor, scanning it and detecting its tits.

Diego Singh, Port au Prince, 2015.

Tomm El Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1984. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami and currently directs the El-Saieh Gallery in Haiti. He recently curated a group exhibition titled The Look at Gucci Vuitton, Miami; and Above the Ground, at El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince. El-Saieh presented a solo exhibition at the Haitian Heritage Center, Miami in 2008. Ant’s Tits at CENTRAL FINE is his first solo exhibition. El-Saieh’s paintings will be included in an upcoming group exhibition presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. 

December 5, 2014 – February 28, 2015

Opening Friday, December 5 from 7PM – Midnight

What to do when the tides of discourse and taste rise against you? What to do with a first painting solo exhibition, with a painting show that wants to be remembered and dreads to vanish? Since our archives are getting heavier and sharper, and memories are producing clearer anxieties; we are in the knot between fear and impotence, and right there, at that point, we encounter that fine term: “paradigm shift.” 1 Everyone and everything seems to want a clean slate, a new brand, in the wake of a marketing-driven tectonic shake. Well, let’s imagine that painting requested to be deleted from all search engines, to start fresh.

For instance, in this exhibition, spray painting seems to be forgetting its past, and not only we can see this in its look but also in its subject matter: no more signs ready for the outdoors, but rather, spray-painted domestic and silent images. As if the spray-gun and that speedy gesture, the one that appeared in Martin Barré’s works, or the vertical signatures often banned by other guns, have now become dense and slow. And that lovely duo conformed by speech or la parole 2 and lalangue 3 are defacing discourse while facing themselves; giving to speech and its capacity for oblivion, a face.

What if our symptomatic fatigue switched speeds and slowed down even further, and we were to use spray paint to produce images that had nothing to do with the well-known material’s behavior? What if painting could ask for the right to be forgotten 4 and start anew?

Wouldn’t it be great to bypass the tyranny of discourse, of forms, of mediums, and finally, through speech, approach a space of intensity, as the Lacanian sphinx challenged us?

In Hubert Bush’s spray paintings we see what he calls ‘afterimages,’ vibrating in the eye, once closed, resisting oblivion and ultimately coming back in the form of a déjà vu. And like ‘revenge porn’ (that poison-pen where someone would upload pornographic content into the web in order to defame you), this déjà vu, the déjà vu of painting, of texts, comes back to coat the painter with another layer of repression.

And yet, it might be that this exhibition is for Hubert Bush a first attempt to claim the right to be forgotten. If we go on-and-on mentioning the luminosity of Rothko, the tension between abstraction and figuration, or between pathos and boredom in these paintings, we will inevitably fall back into the place of mnemonic distress.

The right to be forgotten is the right to erase and reclaim autonomy, to deface the archive and face discourse 5 head-on. Ultimately, in my view, memory, painting, the past, a mark, whatever, are all entitled to re-define powder/power and its speed as vehicles or grounds. And, let’s not look at this as censorship, let’s look at this approach as another lively exchange between speech 6 and discourse.

Diego Singh, Miami; November 10, 2014

Hubert Bush, born in New York City, has a BA from University of Vermont with additional studies completed at Harvard University, Columbia University, and New York University. He has worked as a filmmaker and script-writer. His paintings have been exhibited at Gallery Met in New York and are part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. He will present an upcoming exhibition at the Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach in March, 2015.

1 Paradigm shift: a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.

2 The French term parole presents considerable difficulty to the English translator because it does not correspond to any English term. In some contexts it corresponds to the English term “speech” and in others is best translated as “word.” Parole, for Miller, is drive.

3 Lalangue could be understood as the primary chaotic substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed, almost as if language is some ordered superstructure sitting on top of this substrate.

4 ‘The right to be forgotten’ is a concept that has been discussed and put into practice in the European Union and Argentina in recent years. The issue has arisen from the desires of some individuals to determine the development of his life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past.

5 Lacanian discourse theory has to be understood primarily as a formal system (i.e. independent of any spoken word as such). A discourse exists before any concretely spoken word; even more: a discourse will determine the concrete speech act. This effect of determination is the reflection of the Lacanian basic assumption, that each discourse delineates fundamental relationships, resulting in a particular social bond.

6 Speech, is considered here in the Lacanian sense, as a symbolic exchange that links humans, and ultimately becomes the only means of access to the truth about desire “speech alone is the key to that truth”. See Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. P. 172

December 5, 2014 – January 30, 2015

Opening Friday, December 5 from 7PM – Midnight

The issue of the origin, or origins, cats, superstition, water and silence were present in my last dream. I saw cats asking a male cat to breastfeed them. As if the dad-cat was a mother-cat but the cat had no milk. The kittens were adult cats, feeding from their motherly dad. The cat might be Martin Barré, or a reflection on man-boobs?

Next, Esther and I attempted to cross a small wooden bridge, but then we both started jumping on it, bringing it down. We succeeded and fell into a beautiful green lake and swam our way out. Great experience. I think we wanted to sink the bridge, and just swim, but only swim surrounded by broken wood, because the day was stunning. We heard the name of Aimé Bonpland, the French botanist. (good plant, if we were to translate it). What’s interesting is that in fact, Bonpland’s last name was a nickname given to him by his grandfather after getting word of his birth in the countryside in France. The nickname became a family name, a captcha and his sign. His origin was retold at the moment of birth. The superstition of words/origins was left unresolved and I woke up. Now, I’m thinking about the sinking of the bridge, and how that action isolated me.

Somehow we wrecked the parenthesis, swimming our way above the surface of abstraction and enjoying the weather. This was really taxing on us, I must say, because in a moment we had to deal with a botanist, sinking a bridge, swimming nicknames, last-names, plants, plans, water, and signs. The gesture was a passive aggressive one, but I think we had no choice as the cats aligned to stop us, on the other side of the bridge, fully developed of course, thanks to the milk of their single-dad.

Diego Singh

CENTRAL FINE BUENOS AIRES

Kazuo

Ugarteche 3050, Buenos Aires, El Palacio de los Patos. 1425. 

VERNISSAGE: VIERNES 19 de Abril, de 19 a 21 horas. 

19 de abril – 21 de mayo, 2014

Artists: Yin Quan and Brahma, Diego Singh, Jiae Hwang.

Press Release:

CENTRAL FINE, Buenos Aires presents an appointment between the duo Yin Quan & Brahma, Diego Singh and Jiae Hwang. The artists introduce Kazuo Funaki to Buenos Aires from many angles, making sure that his black and white photograph stumbles upon a space of potency. Using many hands, many heads, etc., the group exhibition clearly attempts to declare that the other only exits oneself when oneself admits that inside, there is no room for anything else. Un hielito acá, regio, bueno... chausito.

About the artists:

Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul, South Korea and has exhibited her work in several venues, including: the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Miami Art Museum, Miami; CENTRAL FINE, Miami; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, etc. She is the Graphic Designer Director of CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach.

Diego Singh was born in Salta, Argentina. He has exhibited his work at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami; MOCA San Diego; PAMM, Miami; the Fondazzione Malvina Menegas, Castelbasso, Italy; Braverman gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel; Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo, Brazil; the Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy; Tomio Koyama gallery, Tokyo; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Galleria Macca, Sardegna, Italy; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, among others. He was co-founder of Terri and Donna Gallery in Miami. He currently directs CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, and co-directs CENTRAL FINE, Buenos Aires (with Esteban Singh Caro and Gracia Martinez Arias) and CENTRAL FINE, Port-au-Prince (with Tomm El-Saieh.)

Yin Quan and Brahma are obviously a made up duo selected because they share a lot: they are deities, and as such, they can float. Brahma sports 4 heads, checking all angles of creation. Quan yin, exhibits 1000 arms, and happens to inspire compassion.

November 24, 2013 – January 20, 2014

Opening: Sunday, November 24, 2013 from 2pm-10pm

CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach presents Rise Above: a solo project by Jiae Hwang. In Rise Above, Hwang explores the demand implicit in the phrase and the expectations to perform accordingly. By ‘rising above’ one is expected to confront another well-known demand: sink or swim. Hwang, (referred to as the artist) approaches that demand as a sort of linguistic and cultural ready-made, and purposefully interprets it in another way: rise becomes rice. In that space, a phonetic interpretation that misreads the initial demand goes in full-force into what the artist calls ‘another type of translation’ bringing the artist’s subjectivity in contrast with the sentence’s imperiousness. In her works, Hwang proceeds to throw and later trace, remove and paint rice on top of large colored silk pieces. This gesture, to throw rice, is an auspicious act in the West, but in Korea, where Hwang was born, throwing rice is a disrespectful gesture towards economy, labor and tradition. To throw it on top of silk would be an even greater offense, as it would imply a negative handling of highly charged economic/symbolic elements. Hwang does not aim at conveying this, but rather pursues the space where misinterpretation brings forward new meaning. In short: fashion, dry-cleaning, silk painting, trade are all faced as cultural pockets.

In the exhibition, Hwang presents a YouTube-found looped video of penguins jumping onto an iceberg. The penguins are expected to rise above it, but instead they slide, fall, or swim back into the ocean, behaving like fish, unable to fly like other birds. In Jiae Hwang’s project, concepts such as reading, performance, language, and expectations are all translated and interpreted through a view that emphasizes equality. For her, to rice is the same as to rise, the trompe l’oeil of rice is placed on equal terms on top of the ready-made ground; the ready-made ground meets color field abstraction, and color field abstraction encounters a ‘colored field’ and non-gender specificity in the silk's peach blossom, or navy businessman’s tones.

Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her work was included in Aesthetics and Value at the Frost Art Museum, Miami; New Work Miami at the Miami Art Museum, Miami; optic nerve, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; El Museo de Arte de El Salvador, El Salvador; Abstract Cinema at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Video Revolutionaries, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Footnotes About Geopolitical, Markets and Amnesia, 2 nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow. She also participated in the group exhibition Uncertain States of America—American Art in the Third Millennium, which was first shown at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and has traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Center for Contemporary Art Warsaw, Warsaw; Le Musée de Sérignan, France; and Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Hwang also participated in the following video

installations: Video: An Art, A History 1965-2005 New Media Collection shown at Centre Pompidou and at Miami Art Central, Miami; and AT THIS TIME: 10 Miami Artists, Rubell Family Foundation, Miami.

Diana Speaks With Animals (Deferred Performance)

Georgia Sagri presents Diana Speaks With Animals, a sequel to Diana Very Dog (DVD), CENTRAL FINE’s inaugural project. Diana Speaks With Animals, a performance project initiated in Athens, is to be installed and broadcasted in Miami Beach. The project consists of a series of photos showing Sagri running in Athens at 5:45 AM, occupying streets, houses, as a nymph, or a Rimbaudian look-alike, on the loose. The works are framed as books, narrating chapters, scenes, and a video: dog, shows Sagri working on her desktop, editing the sound, the visuals and the performance in real-time. Discourse is replaced by speech, or lalangue, as Sagri intervenes the Lacanian concept through a series of abstractions in sound, where her voice becomes pure rhythm, punctuations and beats, abstracting language and aiming for sound.

November 29, 2012 – March 20, 2013

Opening: Thursday, November 29, 2012 from 12-9PM

CENTRAL FINE presents its inaugural exhibition program with Diana Very Dog, a solo project by Georgia Sagri. Diana, belonging to the roman pantheon of deities, poses a question here. One cannot help to wonder why Sagri invokes her name rather than the Greek goddess Artemis. May be because Diana, belonged to a model, such as the Roman one? And maybe Sagri, an Athenian, is purposefully advocating for a repulse of her national deities by choosing a ’newer’ and more ‘arrow-minded’ version of Artemis? Is Sagri observing the mandate of not using Artemis’ name in vain? Or is it that Sagri is interested in the meteoric trajectory of Diana’s arrow and that her name starts with a d, such as dog or Diogenes’ school of cynics?

Diana has the capacity to speak to animals and she is also an accomplished hunter, qualities that Sagri is after, as seen in her video piece where dogs bark, her wall text, or her photos as a naked nymph with a Rimbaudian haircut. Sagri speaks a speech that seems delivered by a person with a triple id: action & action & action. Such a triple id subject is, surprisingly, in total consciousness and control over the notion of own-her-ship. And let’s be clear here: rather than being spoken to, Sagri speaks to it, first and foremost to herself, and later to us with a present and yet ancient own-her-ship. She navigates the streets/ while delivering a voice/ that tongue/ that form of speech outside the limitations of the history of speech/ that shadow of mystery daily embodied and experienced by herself. Sometimes one thinks that she is made or built by phrases that carry within themselves the problem of force. In that unstable ground, Sagri as a topos, where one can load content hunts for titles, for sounds, for forms that direct her trajectory—the structure of action. On action-place-speech we observe an interest in links and hyper-abstraction while participating. A chorus in the broadcasting of a destabilizing omnipresence: Sagri here, Sagri where, very Sagri, Diana very dog.

Georgia Sagri lives in Athens and New York. She participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and has presented exhibitions and performances in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Real Fine Arts, New York; Andrew Roth Gallery, New York; Terri and Donna Gallery, Miami; the Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami; Lars Friedrich Gallery, Berlin; Sotoso, Brussels; Melaspapadopoulos, Athens, among others. Georgia Sagri has been featured in publications such as Art Forum Magazine, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, and the New York Times.