NEW YORK, NY.- James Fuentes is presenting Offsight, a group show curated by Didier William, on view from July 19 through August 12, 2022. The show includes work by Abigail Lucien, Leslie Smith III, Alex Jackson, Marianna Olague, Paul Anthony Smith, Widline Cadet, Mark Fleuridor, Destiny Belgrave, Raelis Vasquez and Cosmo Whyte.
Something is always lost in representation. To relay a story, regardless of language—verbal, visual, and otherwise—contending with a certain degree of loss is inevitable. To that end, looking, particularly active looking, might be akin to mourning. The artists in OffSight fill this space of loss with acts of inventive, alchemical storytelling. What is lost in their works is not always immediately evident; some conditions are best kept between an artist and their process. What is unmistakable, however, is how each succeeds at making me miss something I didn’t know I needed. It’s in this moment that sight becomes a ritualistic and sacred temporal act.
The longing I’m suggesting here is the good kind of longing. The redemptive kind. The kind of longing that helps us heal from the ruptures of stepping outside of our bodies. Instead of promising branded truths, these artists propose a quality of presence that rewards active looking and (re)discovery. They heighten our awareness of the air that fills the space between the limits of our sight and the surfaces of their subjects. In this air my breathing slows and deepens as I look more intently at their work:
I look more closely at the citations of architecture, nomadic instruments, and suggestions of ruin in the sci-fi sculptures of Abigail Lucien. In Cosmo Whyte’s drawing I face a dense and weighted apparition. Ornamented, adorned, and at the same time obscured, the figure (or is it two?) seems to shape-shift before our eyes. In Widline Cadet’s intimate pictures, bodies become enmeshed with each other and with the landscape, as in this work, in which they disappear altogether. In doing so, Cadet’s characters expand themselves beyond the limitations of any singular subjectivity. Likewise, as objects,
Leslie Smith III’s modular paintings fragment and compartmentalize the sometimes planar expectations of painting, yielding slices of color, shape, and form in ways that disobey the bounds of the picture.
As Paul Anthony Smith plucks into the surfaces of his pictures, he conceals an additive gesture inside of a reductive process—not only cloaking or armoring figures but transforming them into something possibly truer and more present than humans are allowed to be. Reconstructing a classical sense of composition, Destiny Belgrave’s portrait lovingly regards ancestry as it lives in familial acts of care and nourishment. Mark Fleuridor‘s portrait of a loved one parallels this process, collapsing personal memory and family narratives inside a visually layered, kaleidoscopic image. In their own ways, both Belgrave and Fleuridor use collage as a means of distinguishing family histories that are more often hidden, camouflaged, or withheld. Through this form they find potential paths of release and recombination in order to tell stories in and of the aftermath of generational movement and immigration.
Marianna Olague’s narrative portrait places attention on tenderness in community, set against the presence of physical boundaries that may serve as either border or protection. Raelis Vasquez’s naturalistic paintings call forth questions of class, race, and geography. In both, their use of intense color antagonizes my attempts to make rigid their otherwise pulsing scenes. They burn like hot lights into the retina, imprinting family stories that have passed through generations— becoming more affective than they are “true.” Alex Jackson’s painting turns this gazing into electricity that traces the paths of looking across the entirety of his surface. The aftershocks of this encounter—a seemingly infinite expanse made of overlapping and intersecting marks—bridges new stories and forms, and at other times intentionally foil our desires to make sense of their exuberant performances.
All of these artworks point me toward what I miss when I’m looking. They ask us to consider where the limits of an object or image fall short, and find space in the simply unknowable. With them I redirect my gaze to the corners, the gaps, and the pockets of our narratives that reveal more to us about ourselves than we already know. —Didier William
