CENTRAL FINE

José Delgado Zúñiga. Squeeze Box.

Preview: Saturday 18th, 11-5 pm

Opening Reception: Sunday 19th, 6-8 pm

We are proud to announce Squeeze Box, a solo presentation by José Delgado Zúñiga.

The figures of authority that have been prevalent in Delgado Zúñiga’s practice announce what exists between pressure and expansion, highlighting elasticity as a key component in one’s position towards the mechanisms that aim to “format” the subjective.

José speaks of this current body of work: There is pressure and anxiety built up inside when I think, or I am confronted with, a situation by judges who have conjured me and regulated my power, my individuality.

In this presentation, the subjective meets a box-like structure, where mandates echo each other, building up a cacophony of signifiers that attempt to mold the subject, squeezing out what is personal.

Stylized figures consider the role of the cartoon in this new body of work: When society loses faith in humanity and reason, social forces push us towards the cartoon. Cartoons are highly commodified, predetermined caricature structures, whose realities and freedoms are regulated. Authority, and judges who impose borders on thinking. The walls of the borders act as Images and Idols, they are mental constructs that shape and REGULATE reality (perception, attitudes, mannerisms, morals, values, humor et-cet. in social order).

In his paintings it is almost inevitable to look at scenes packed with drama, superpowers, superheroes, victims, and villains acting as context. But rather than proposing a theater of the disastrous; José Delgado Zúñiga opens avenues to explore empathy, and other ways to approach what eludes definition.

I think of Michelangelo's painting “The Torment of Saint Anthony”, where demons attempt to subjugate him. However, we are not in medieval times, when mysticism was the rule of secular life. But I can’t help to notice cultural, political, and religious influences moving towards that destination.

Here, Anticipatory Anxiety starts analyzing itself, and fear becomes curiosity and exploration. Not everything is defined by formulas and molds, by symmetrical judgements that mirror each other. Castration is a reality, a hole to learn to live with, not through resignation; but by turning what horrifies us into a type of knowledge that emerges from that thing which is unknown .

The accordion, an instrument that opens and closes, creating sound, is a constant personage in José Delgado Zúñiga’s work. His father played it, and it has become through the years, a resource to consider image-making as another type of speech. What cannot be said out loud —for whatever reason— opens up the sounds of the personal trough color, the power of imagination and amalgamation….Symptoms are painted and transformed, liberating pressure, expanding a voice and the forces that defy the demands of predetermination.

José Delgado Zúñiga was born in Ventura, CA in 1988.

He has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions at the Marquez Art Projects Foundation, the Yale Divinity School of Sacred Music, New Haven, CT; Museum of Ventura County, Ventura, CA; Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA; and in Bronx Calling: The 5th AIM Bronx Biennial, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Figure Fire Fantasy, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Miami, FL; The Frost Art Museum, Florida, CENTRAL SOUNDS at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Chelsea, CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; among others.

Delgado Zúñiga holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the Robert Gamblin Fellowship.

He worked as Adjunct Faculty, at Columbia University School of the Arts, New York City; between 2017 and 2021, and was Lead Teaching Artist and Muralist at Groundswell, Brooklyn, NY during 2017-2020.

His work is included in the collections the Marquez Art Projects Foundation, Miami, the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, and The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; ; among other prominent collections.