Farley Aguilar “Cleansing”

Lyles & King

poster for Farley Aguilar “Cleansing”
[Image: Farley Aguilar "Cleanse" (2018)]

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Lyles & King presents Cleansing, Farley Aguilar’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Cleansing brings together nine large-scale oil paintings of eroticism and trauma. In an unsettling, timely juxtaposition, Aguilar depicts scenes of seaside beauty pageants from the 1920s and ‘30s alongside images of World War II resistance members shaving the heads of alleged collaborators. Sourced from historic photographs and rendered with his singular aesthetic, these nightmarish scenes strike home in a world where the body is the battleground.

Over the past several years, the Miami-based Aguilar (b. 1981, Nicaragua) has developed a distinct pictorial language, depicting tableaux of grotesque figures with unspooled gestures and a delirious palette. Using all manner of brushwork, oil sticks, and pencil to create these deeply unsettling compositions, Aguilar dredges the psychological depth of James Ensor and Edvard Munch, as well as German Expressionist cinema and Existentialism. Placid pools of color crash against jagged forms, figures spring from the scribbled noise of the ground. Faces are masks more expressive and shifting than flesh itself. The artist works from found photographs—portraits, crowd scenes, war reportage—thus undergirding his paintings with historical reality. By basing his compositions in fact, Aguilar wrings even more turmoil from their surfaces, accessing the waking nightmare of the twentieth century.

The works in Cleansing reveal a frenzied pageantry of violence: psychological storm clouds loom over Aguilar’s seaside compositions, while his images of ritualized humiliation feel darkly carnivalesque. Importantly, the artist’s reference to French resistance fighters shaving the heads of female collaborators is unhinged from that specific context. Aguilar shows how, throughout history, the body is scapegoated—the flashpoint and symptom of social turmoil. This could be the female body, that of the minority, or the migrant. Through the lens of his paintings, Aguilar meditates on fundamental social balances: the shift between seeing and being seen, between agency and objectification, and, perhaps most importantly, the relationship between the individual and the crowd. Whether he is portraying a lone sitter or a crowded street scene, Aguilar instills in his anonymous subjects a near-Dostoevskian existential depth. His figures stare out at the viewer, lost and adrift, like Watteau’s Pierrot, and we stare back, submitting to their logic, embracing their grotesquery, feeling the growing pangs of
empathy.

Farley Aguilar (b. 1980, Nicaragua) lives and works in Miami, FL. Recent exhibitions include Shifting Gaze: A Reconstruction of the Black & Hispanic Body in Contemporary Art, The Mennello Museum, Orlando, US and We are the people. Who are you?, Edel Assanti, London, UK. His work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Brown University, and the Orlando Museum of Art. Aguilar is represented by Lyles & King.

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Schedule

from January 18, 2019 to February 24, 2019

Opening Reception on 2019-01-18 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Farley Aguilar

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