SELECTED WORKS

Jennifer Basile offers an escape to a mangrove oasis in Oleta III. Throughout her life, Basile has turned to nature for its vast healing aspect, through sublime beauty and escapism. Her practice of grand-scale prints creates an environment with which her audience receives the hypnotic effects of an untainted Floridian landscape. Oleta III is a window into our native state, a rendering of a scene experienced by Basile on a visit to Oleta State Park. Her medium allows her to emphasize the jeweled effect created by the mangrove leaves reflected in woven crystal waterways. The formal process with which Basile creates these renderings is emblematic of her meditative and labor-intensive medium. As an artist, Basile truly immerses herself in her work, as she scouts the locations that she later reproduces in her work by hiking, camping, and road-tripping through the raw, mystical world that exists in the backyard of our fast-paced society. Her hand-pulled, one-of-a-kind reduction prints expose each movement with which Basile recreates the scene for viewers, using a bold and undoubtedly endemic palette in the process.

In Hombre y Arroyo, Tomás Sánchez provides a mystical landscape composed of the grandeur, solitude, and healing powers which nature provides. Mixing a genus of trees on the bank of a secluded river, he uses calculated applications of acrylic on canvas to dwarf the singular figure he placed within the scene. The tropical vivacity of Mother Nature, along with the decision by Sánchez to tuck his human subject deep in this serene biome create a sense of voyeurism by the viewer, as if one is witnessing a moment of personal introspection taking place. These factors, along with the decision of scale invite the viewer to peer into a spiritual realm, following each brushstroke laid by Sánchez as a facet of a naturalistic mosaic, made as a tool of self-realization. Throughout his life, Sánchez has seen the range of atrocity reaped upon humanity in his native country of Cuba. While much of his work juxtaposes the sublime found within the natural world with the treatment of humans upon it, this particular scene acts as an amulet of healing. As a work of art created in the later stages of his career, Hombre y Arroyo infuses the artist’s personal life; his lived experiences, with the spiritual journey and the tools he has used to overcome them.

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T. Eliott Mansa
For Those Gathered in the Wind VI, 2019
stuffed animals, plastic flowers, toy cars, nails, belts, and acrylic on wood
13 x 13 x 7 inches
33.02 x 33.02 x 17.78 cm.

As a three-dimensional artist, T. Eliott Mansa has a lengthy practice of using found materials to build the body of his wall-mounted sculptures. Mansa draws inspiration from the intrinsic apotropaic quality of objects – an idea emphasized in the West African practices of nkisi nkondi and bocio figurines– combined with the visual inspiration of roadside memorials and household shrines. Locally and across the United States, roadside shrines are created frequently to honor victims of senseless violence. While his practice takes stage in the contemporary art scene of Miami, Mansa injects ritual tied to Caribbean and African roots that both inform and inspire his work to ensure that each move made in the process of creation has purpose. In this coupled composition featured from a larger series, For Those Gathered in the Wind (XV & VI), Mansa calls to the visual memory of the viewer by using items of sentiment, inextricably activating an emotional response. The color palette choices chosen selected by Mansa further evokes the purpose with which these works of assemblage are made to possess. Offerings are presented to the shrines and accomplished here by Mansa’s monochromatic palette, leaving them bathed in color. While the wall-mounted presentation of these assemblages harkens back to the conventional history of painting, Mansa has provided provides viewers with his culmination of an  amuletic work of art.

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Jake Fernández forges his style through piecing together experiences of submerging oneself in nature’s serenity. By breaking down the foundation of his materials, he creates a composite of a memory through reminiscence. In Untitled, Fernández follows his practice of layering individually painted fractals of wood with high impressionism. Through his unique formal process, he creates a space where the paint, along with the varying texture of these wooden surfaces, further complement the image laid upon them. Classically trained in landscape painting, Fernández uses his understanding of the timeless genre in order to portray nature’s ever-changing process. While his artistic interests began at a young age, a sense of impermanence became imbued upon Fernández through frequent relocation: from Havana to Gainesville, and later to New York. This inspired Fernández’s work, as he began to explore the ways with which he could capture the experience of nature without replicating it directly, encompassing the sensations, not solely the image. By approaching both his medium and subject with curiosity, Fernández is boundless in his artistic attempts to bring his vision to fruition by manifesting the fleeting experience of nature to an audience. Untitled follows this path, as he has reproduces a shady refuge built from tones of rich green and pale yellow, complete with shifts in shadow and movement between palm fronds.

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Master of modernism, Emilio Sanchez, frequently elevated the simple structures and shapes present in passing life through his artwork. Forging a style inspired by the ocular archive of his colorful life and surroundings would become the legacy of Sanchez throughout his vast body of work. Untitled (Barbados Barrack) displays this thematic inspiration through and through, staying consistent with his vibrant architectural studies which took over the later part of his career. In Untitled (Barbados Barrack), hard diagonals and sweeping shadows show the skill with which Sanchez transforms recognizable spaces into abstract landscapes. Minty greens and sky blues paired with a range of tonal grays further drive the optical juxtaposition. By using a reductionist process, Sanchez elevates his subject matter by emphasizing the formal components that summate them. From the hues of the Caribbean, reflective of his youth between Camagüey and Miami, to the bold atmosphere he encountered when attending the Art Students League of New York, Sanchez, in order to document and interpret the world he lives in, created a language all his own.

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As a Miami-based artist, Tim Buwalda encounters the relationship between an urban city, and the resilience of the land it is often laid upon. Here, in Viewshed I, Buwalda explores a separation from his iconic automotive subjects while keeping consistency in theme. By elevating a vacant gas station through strong formalism, Buwalda separates his style from photorealistic reproductions and places his practice in the realm of naturalism via the malleability of his subjects. Rather than treating the gas station as what one conventionally interprets as a gas station, his choice of title, Viewshed I, lets viewers into the conscious decisions he made when framing his subject to illuminate the forms created by the architecture and shadows that compose the scene laid out before him. He juxtaposes objects with the space they occupy, masterfully done in this intimate canvas. Buwalda elevates the abandoned Camel Stop emblematic of the American Southwest through his handling of light and color. Reminiscent of works by artists like Richard Estes and Edward Hopper, Buwalda calls to both of these figures who spent their artistic career immortalizing an era of Americana through both painting and photography. The sense of serenity that permeates through Viewshed I transforms a commonplace road trip scene into an opportunity for contemplation, challenging the viewer to expand their senses in order to appreciate the aesthetics of place.

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Cuban born, Miami-based artist, Gustavo Acosta, focuses his creative energy into producing a body of work that uncovers the destructive forces built within our societal narratives. Through his visual investigation of the footprint impressed upon a continuous narrative of humanity via infrastructure, Acosta aims to create an archive in which the ubiquitous nature of the human experience is undeniable. La Casa de Juan presents viewers with a failed nuclear plant, pixelated through a varying schematic of purple tones. The geometric nature of his subject parallels the stylistic method with which he chooses to approach it; a tactic which allows him to adopt a recognizable urban landscape into his referential system of images, effectively illuminating viewers to the illusory nature of what are generally conceived to be distinct spaces. Acosta displays fine handling of his medium, meticulously rendering each facet within his transformed landscapes and challenging viewers to distinguish a rendition from reality. Through the amalgamation of these formal decisions, Acosta shifts his brick and mortar sources of inspiration to straddle a fine line between reality and falsity, one drawn towards a path of ambiguity.

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Multifaceted Cuban artist and activist, Dolores “Loló” Soldevilla, spent her life pursuing her passions. Falling in line with much of Soldevilla’s contemporaneous works, Untitled reflects the rhythmic multimedia compositions she produced during the 1950s. Individually cut and colored spheres mirror an arch of vertical rectangles, with each geometric group coming to a crescendo in a palette reminiscent of the era. Through a rather involved political career, Soldevilla gained the opportunity to travel to Paris in order to promote the Cuban Avant-Garde in the continuously sought-after Parisian art scene. However, she ultimately became hypnotized by the range of styles displayed within the internationally acclaimed Salons, pushing her to pursue her own artistic journey. As Loló was entering her forties, she began channeling her energy further into her artistic pursuits, and after visiting US museums in Chicago and New York, she moved to Paris permanently in 1949, with her first solo exhibition debuting a year later. Her style is built on a concentration of contrast through her use of shape, hard lines, and a polarized palette, deeply reminiscent of the kinetic sculptural aesthetic forged by Alexander Calder. Soldevilla frequently employs repetition as a necessary facet to the musicality of her work, regardless of medium. Soldevilla’s life as a politician informed her work as an artist, as she deeply believed her modernist, minimal style reflected the new social order that would land in Cuba post-World War II.

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Artist Fernando García was a vanguard figure in the Miami Generation of the 1980s, creating work easily recognized by its geometric and vibrantly colored bodies. Garcia received a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Georgia in Athens in 1968, later earning graduate credits in mathematics from Georgia State University, and utilized mathematical concepts throughout his short but fruitful career. García was conceptually bold, and used his artistic practice as a means to reflect the world around him while tangentially infusing his productions with celebrations, criticisms, and commentary to leave a lasting message; one that would be emblematic of a unique moment in Miami’s history. The influx of Cuban emigration and simultaneous growth of the city’s contemporary art scene created an environment in which the young artists of the Miami Generation came to reach maturity in a decade that would actively contribute to the historical art footprint left on the metropolitan city. Jazz Babies VIII, VII, III do justice to Garcia’s iconic aesthetic through these vibrantly constructed, wall-mounted sculptures. Within Jazz Babies, García displays his exploration of the quadro-count found within musical composition through a symphony of shapes in abstracted and irregular segments of four. In the true nature of the artist, García imbued his interests of count, geometry, and pattern found in both the natural and constructed world throughout his work, and through this interdisciplinary approach, allows the mind of the maker to come out through artistic legacy.

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In this early composition created after relocating to Miami, Venezuelan native Tony Vazquez-Figueroa explores the mark making that results from the spill technique that later became emblematic within his practice. Reminiscent of color field artists, Vazquez-Figueroa allows his medium to establish itself in its natural forms to solidify the beauty within organicism. Deeply inspired by the dripping quality of crude oil that has driven his homeland historically and resulting in deep socioeconomic effect, Color Spill III is a facet of Vazquez-Figueroa’s practice that employs these themes in a precursory manner. Using a simple color palette of pale yellow, crimson, and black, Color Spill III comes together through the layering and transparency of resin laid upon synthetic paper, playing on the formal qualities of painting. This elegant composition is part of a series where Vazquez-Figueroa plays out the ideas of materiality that he later manipulates in his iconic blackened sculptures and large-scale installations. Throughout his body of work, Vazquez-Figueroa aims to create a personal archive in order to translate the experience imbued upon him by his early life in Venezuela, through a constructivist process with control over the medium that veritably controlled the environment in which he was raised. Color Spill III and its accompaniments in the series provide a dignified method for him to show the genesis of these ideas.

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Agustín Cárdenas began his life in the city of Matanzas, Cuba, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in San Alejandro. As a young adult, Cárdenas brought endemic influences to Paris where he aided in the cultivation of sculpture within the Surrealist movement. Just shy of thirty years old, he participated in a group exhibition, heeding the advice of André Breton, which not only solidified his position within the movement, but proved to be a moment that catalyzed his career. Ventana en el Jardin (Window in the Garden) is representative of works produced at the height of Cárdenas’s artistic development, utilizing a geometric yet fluid aesthetic woven from threads of Dogon totems and known masters within his practice, such as Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp. Through Ventana en el Jardin (Window in the Garden), Cárdenas created a portal using weighted, biomorphic figures imposed upon an otherwise cloudless view through his constructed window. For Cárdenas, his interest in sculpture was most likely rooted from his Congolese background. Dogon sculptures are deeply ritualistic, with everything from the materials used, to totemic icons, and methods of display each carrying their own spiritual weight. Cárdenas transferred this animistic quality through this work with Pentelic marble, hand carving the ancient material once used in the creation of Athenian sculptures to create his portal, a window to contemplate both the physical world and the metaphysical absolutes it disguises. It is important to note that a window can be used to look both inward and outward, playing to the persistent dualism that has accompanied Cárdenas throughout his life experiences, artistic journey, and cultural influences.

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Miami-based artist Natalia Garcia-Lee uses her practice to decode distinctive zones of human behavior. From collage to canvas, Garcia-Lee displays her fascination with the science behind our seemingly logical thoughts and the societies that manifest themselves through her personal artistic processing of each facet. The Single Family Home Series is a suite of paintings that aim to work through our species’ needs for shelter, aiming to answer the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of our built societies. Garcia-Lee’s series-based format is iconic of her practice, and allows her to reiterate and further question structures that not only house, but analogously control, our world. The Single Family Home Series shows her utilization of stencils, in distinctive reiterations of what is commonly recognized as a ‘home.’ Four walls and slatted roof tops lay within compositions that disguise such recognizable symbols, allowing for viewers to project their personal inferences on differing installments of the subject. While Garcia-Lee employs an optical icon reminiscent of the nuclear family, the subject at hand applies to a wider range of architectural metaphors that challenge viewers to question how built societies have essentially constructed their own containment.

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One of the most iconic figures of the 20th century, Roberto Matta has long been understood as a figurehead in the monumental movement that would radically affect the direction and progression of subsequent movements, well into the twentieth century. With an exploration of the human psyche during the chaotic historical era that ensued, Matta used his practice as a means to translate the unspoken nuances that bubbled to the surface with compositions reminiscent of hypnagogic landscapes. La Tierra (El Peru) se Disfruta is characteristic of later works created by Matta, and displays his maturity in style, combining biomorphic skeletal figures with ghostly masses in a boundless space and leading the viewer to create relationships that animate the scene. It is essential to note Matta’s architectural background, which may have led to his career-long tendency to create cinematic stills, as he plays with space, light, and the exchange between operational figures that interact with one another throughout these compositions. He is admirably noted for his created environments, and contemporaries, such as Marcel Duchamp, have considered him to be among the most profound painters of his time. Matta’s legacy endures, as his masterful works continuously reach the depths of his viewers with a brand of surrealism aimed to express facets of the vast and intangible mind.

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Rafael Soriano, a leading figure in the establishment of Latin American modernism, infused his work with explorations of spiritualism to uncover the depth that lies in the human experience. Through the later part of his career, Soriano shifted to become a true figurehead in decoding the role of the spirit through nuances of surrealism. In 1962, Soriano was exiled from Cuba and relocated to Miami, resulting in deep trauma and a radical shift in his artistic career. After a creative impasse that lasted years, Soriano delved back into his practice with a changed aesthetic. Soriano created a body of work that aims to capture the light within humankind, distilled, and wrapped in chiffon-like layers of color to allow the luminosity to show through the canvas. In El Ilusionista, Soriano presents a vaguely rendered subject, wielding a similarly constructed cloud above, both made to act as vehicles for the tropological message he aimed to convey. What he presents is not a true figurative representation, but raw emotion that must then be veiled and transformed to be received by a terrestrial audience. It is evident through Soriano’s layered use of color that he carefully swaddles critical points of connection, allowing a warm glow to reveal the cerebral relationship of the organic groups to one another. Calling to traditional portraiture of the Late Renaissance, the severe and total blackout of the background pushes his subjects forward, providing viewers a focused opportunity to explore the endless microcosm that lies within the work.

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Conceptual artist Florencio Gelabert is most recognized for the body of fictional ruins he has produced over the decades of his career. Having grown up playing games of war in his youth, he became familiar with ideas, both created and concrete, surrounding decimated urban landscapes. Following in the footsteps of his father, modernist sculptor José Florencio Gelabert Pérez, Florencio Gelabert Jr. forged a minimalist style that would stand out in his field of contemporary art through his utilization of a playful yet timeless message. Gelabert’s practice is steeped in a personal archaeology that he builds out through a method of deconstruction, using industrial materials in his ruinous imagery to evoke the past and present lives of objects while on a quest to understand the purpose of our built societies. Displacement XI was conceived as a facet within a larger body of work that operates as a playground of destruction reminiscent of his adolescent memories. In this wall-mounted sculpture, Displacement XI presents viewers with the subliminal beauty found within a shattered piece of ceramic, prodding a dark curiosity that exists within humans to look after natural disasters, accidents, or venues of war. By finding the beauty in destruction, Gelabert insets the poetic dualism of humanity through this simple yet powerful composition.

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Miami native and sculptor Michael Loveland uses his practice to reclaim the city he calls home. Using found objects, Loveland repurposes commonplace objects, sometimes seen as waste, to create dynamic, wall-mounted compositions. As someone who has seen the vast growth and drastic change of the metropolitan city, Loveland aims to immortalize facets of these communal experiences by transforming them within his arctic practice. In Close Up, a discarded billboard becomes his canvas, complete with mounted glass and a vibrant palette, inviting viewers to take a closer look and experience the range of textures and dimensions he has created. Transformation plays a large part in the effect of his work, for the inherent value of these objects is elevated by their place within these wall-mounted sculptures. Close Up is emblematic of Loveland’s larger message, exposing his desire to inform viewers of the vast lives, and afterlives held by objects as he composes them in this manner to derive new meaning. Influenced by twentieth century icon Robert Rauschenberg and philosophies birthed in postmodernism, Loveland breaks the contrived boundaries surrounding fine art. He exploits his reclaimed mediums and explores their optical value, thus proving the transcendental nature of manmade objects within our consumerist society.

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Cuban-American artist Mario Bencomo spent the majority of his life in a state of flux when it came to establishing a sense of place, one he eased through his artistic pursuits. At an impressionable age, Bencomo experienced a transatlantic journey that would uproot his life, and catalyze a skew of thematics within his body of work. Deeply inspired by lived experiences, the natural world, and the art of literature, Bencomo’s muses were endlessly abundant. While Bencomo has developed an iconic abstract expressionist style through collage, he emphasizes different facets of his medium miscellany when needed, as displayed here in A Poem by Severo Sarduy. In Bencomo’s ode to the daring author and friend, he composes Sarduy’s words within the red brick-like fragments that provide an intimate, yet bold space for Sarduy’s words to reside. Bencomo keeps true to his thematic relationships, allowing the fluid poetics that celebrate nature to juxtapose the textured geometric background he creates. A loving note, “a Mario Bencomo, de Servero Sarduy,” reveals the deeper levels of collage, as the viewer is let into the cherished exchange, timelessly captured on paper.

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French-American painter and printmaker John William Bailly has spent his career aiming to expose consistencies within accepted written histories to understand the larger enigma that is humanity. He does so by layering mechanisms derived by distinctly different societies throughout these histories—separated by centuries, or existing across oceans—to distill a sense of truth. Deeply inspired by mythology, geography, and the diversity found within nature itself, Bailly employs these facets and pieces together a personal understanding of a universal experience. In this suite of paintings, Maria de Miami, Prometheus de Miami, Mary Magdalene de Miami, and Christ de Miami, Bailly places deities celebrated through both the religious and artistic histories of the West within the perennial mangrove marshes that were once occupied by native tribes of South Florida. He transpires the figures that populate Greco-Roman mythology, along with Biblical characters, in an act of both transcendence and displacement to provoke viewers to question their roots. By nature, Bailly is exceedingly academic in his artistic pursuits. From his technical approach to the historical references he injects within these vibrant compositions, he ensures that each stroke laid upon the canvas serves a purpose in his artistic pursuit to answer enduring anthropologic questions.

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World-renowned master painter Arturo Rodríguez infuses his experience of a migratory youth within his body of work through subject, artistic influences, and execution. As an impressionable teen, Rodríguez made the journey from Cuba across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain before settling in Miami: a metropolis built on sensory traces of the tropics through its mixed population and history. Rodríguez uses a universal experience of displacement as a focal point within his iconic series, Arcimboldo’s Ghosts. In this grand composition, Arcimboldo, Diane Arbus, Sharaku, Utamaro Ghost, the figure stands as a mosaicked portrait; displaying enlarged faces and graphic handling reminiscent of Edo-period printmakers and the estranged emotion captured in portraits by photographer Diane Arbus, translated through a striking palette of produce iconic of Italian mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The phantasmal figures Rodríguez constructs are an amalgamation of lonely icons, distinctive within the history of both fine art and photography, that function for Rodríguez as a wave of preternatural migrants that each encapsulate a sense of isolation and displacement.

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Through his practice, César Trasobares reflects a bicultural personal saga while honoring celebrated masters in the history of art. FOREVER OPEN follows this thematic thread, as he engages not only his own experiences, but actively challenges viewers by sourcing and mixing imagery from various traditions. An emblematic figure of The Miami Generation, Trasobares initially imbued his work with experiences of exile and transplantation. This unique aesthetic shared with some of his contemporaries bridged the boundaries of objective representation with psychological and political nuances posed by the syncretic aesthetic of that generation. In FOREVER OPEN, Trasobares utilizes a medical room divider as his canvas and composes a symphony of biomorphic, abstracted organisms, almost generated automatically, reminiscent of the phantasmagoric apparitions created by Hieronymus Bosch, the fantastic and fanciful creatures painted by Joan Miró and the abstractions of Roberto Matta. By using materials thought to be unconventional, Trasobares employs myriad formal approaches in his constructions as his worldview expanded beyond locality and the narrow expressions of displaced individuals. The physicality of this sculpture, including the fleeting shadows activated by changing light conditions, allow for interpretations beyond the standing syntax of language, the logic of science and the conventions of cultural realms. In this context, Trasobares brings us art that encourages the examination and questioning of the limits of actual time, the probing of microscopic life and the exploration of universal pictorial space.

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Cuban born, Miami-based artist William Osorio uses conventional methods in his approach to painting, yet the theoretical message that shines through his striking compositions is birthed from a place of deconstruction. Throughout his practice, expressionist interpretations of people and their experiences have become emblematic of his work, yet the subjects he aims to convey are not the limbs or faces of the figures, but the transformative events that are stirring within them. His latest rendering, Eve II (Vispera), presents viewers with a jubilant, young couple after a long-awaited reunion, framed by bold bands of color. Osorio places subsidiary limbs within the portrait to evoke a level of movement, reminiscent of the Cubist desire to show more than one moment and more than one dimension. The fixation on exposing ‘more’ to the viewer launches Eve II (Vispera) for Osorio, allowing him to employ the canvas as a tool to discuss the concept of time on the human experience. Osorio thinks of us as a species conditioned by this construct of “living in a perpetual eve of events.” In this scene of conciliation, two fragmented figures occupy the canvas, yet the true subject of Osorio’s work is the essence of time and its accompanying collateral effects.

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“Alfonzo’s exhibition at the Bass had extraordinary meaning for him. He expressed himself to me in the following way: “A note to invite you to this show. I think it will be a beautiful – and strange – one. When I look at this work, for the first time, I see my marks, but now I also see me. It is very frightening but wonderful.” Home, on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, may have been inspired by his mother’s visit; it was just as likely motivated by his own sense of mortality. The subject of home suggests rootedness and belonging; it is an external place as much as an internal concept and emotional state. Among the kneeling figures, the one outlined in white in the center of the composition appears to be pregnant. Her enlarged abdomen suggests a nascent life, one at the opposite extreme from the artist’s own. The female figure is rendered against the delicately drawn lines of an upside-down witness. The conflation of a pregnant figure, together with a witness, creates a sense of double fragility. The small hollow cube to the right of the spiral head refers to creation. One side of the cube is painted white, literally and metaphorically illuminating the scene in addition to providing an exit from darkness.”

Dr. Julia P. Herzberg, Ph.D. from Carlos Alfonzo: Transformative Work from Cuba to Miami and the U.S. from the Carlos Alfonzo: Witnessing Perpetuity catalogue essay

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INSTALLATION VIEWS

SELECTED PRESS

LIST OF ARTISTS
Gustavo Acosta
Carlos Alfonzo
John William Bailly
Jennifer Basile
Mario Bencomo
Tim Buwalda
Agustiín Cárdenas
Jake Fernández
Fernando García
Natalia Garcia-Lee
Florencio Gelabert
Wifredo Lam
Michael Loveland
T. Eliott Mansa
Roberto Matta
William Osorio
Arturo Rodríguez
Emilio Sanchez
Tomás Sánchez
Loló Soldevilla
Rafael Soriano
César Trasobares
Tony Vazquez-Figueroa