Yanira Collado and Federico Villarino Exhibition

Cindy Rucker Gallery

This event has ended.

Yanira Collado is an artist that reaches into the past in order to narrate a more inclusive history, one that includes the people that endured the most sacrifice. As a child, Collado traveled between social structures: from Brooklyn, where she was born; to the Dominican Republic; to Miami, where her mother worked to become a tailor. Her two-dimensional pieces bring together poetic nuances of pattern, material, geometry, and time, her unrefined edges telling us that our collective histories have always been there, even before discovery.

Her textured collages incorporate geometric forms that allude to the triangulation of her childhood, the language of textile arts of the displaced African slaves, and the Caribbean diaspora. As Yanira describes. “My work attempts to assemble a visual language that reconciles the process in which the history of this information is recorded, stored, and retrieved. I am interested in the labor inherent in these materials and the shapes taken during their transitions, which conjure up invocations, ritual, a transcendence of presence, and in many ways, fragments becoming whole.”

Federico Villarino is an artist that plays with the instability of the reproduced image, working with imagined landscapes often inspired by other artworks, sacred geometry, even occult symbology. Villarino’s paintings are vividly colored, often depicting large, sweeping botanicals in an indeterminate light. These gestures are “interrupted” by their jagged, painted edge, offering a pixelated take on the unnatural natural. Never populated, the artist suggests that his viewer offer the narrative point to his paintings as the person that engages and interacts with his imagined landscapes.

Working from a modified computer image, the artist bends and manipulates images until they become something several versions away from what they were, but are stilled from the never-ending flux of what they can become. “When I imagine a new painting I paint small oils in a small format, I select one, scan it, edit it on the computer changing proportions, inverting colors or breaking its formal structure. What I bring to the canvas with the projector is an image that went through various states. Finally, painting the picture is to capture a particular moment of that fluctuating path.”