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.