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.