KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is pleased to announce X MARKS THE SPOT:  in partnership with Laundromat Art Space in Miami, Florida will feature Felix Carmelo Rios, Guillermo García Cruz, Marisol Martinez, and Mary Valverde. This roster of Latinx artists approach geometric abstractions with their unique processes. García Cruz creates unexpected black shapes with his sculptural paintings that he calls his “glitches” with minor shifts. While García Cruz destabilizes the entire visual weight of his work, Rios stabilizes his paintings with rhythm and design. Like Rios, Martinez is also concerned with the kinetic balance between color and shape in her work. While Martinez’s configurations are formed by a meditative process, Valverde creates her transcendent offerings from a spiritual space. This ensemble of works provides a nuanced view into today’s distinct, yet interconnected, genre of geometric abstraction. 

Felix Carmelo Rios color palette is inspired by the 1931 Le Corbusier’s Architectural Polychromic and proportions are taken from the Fibonacci Sequence numbers, which are strongly related to the Golden Ratio. These compositions are not about mathematics or science, they are about geometric rhythmic accuracy and the emotions they evoke to the viewer. In the Botanical Modular Compositions Series on view, “I explore the dialogue between colors, shapes, and proportions and the relationship with their surroundings.”

Guillermo García Cruz paintings, Wall XXIIMI a and b (glitched series) seeks for a link between suprematism and the digital era. The rectangle, this geometric shape, that marked the limits within everything happened in the painting field, from the Renaissance until the 1950’s, is questioned but in a very minimal way, in this opportunity through the concept of glitch. “The last 2 years we have all gone through unprecedented times of global transformations, so as an artist, experimenting with this term that comes from programming and computing, is the way of reflecting a displacement that doesn’t destroy the system but generates questions about its permanency.”

Marisol Martinez is a painter who contrasts both thru color and subject matter, often spatial as well as prismatic. The unguided stillness of each shape is a meditative process individually created to compliment the other. The interconnection of shapes and colors offer insight into Martinez 'unique experience of the world creating a visually spiritual vocabulary. She evokes the viewer to question their existence and emotions through the use of color and shape. On view are two acrylic works on canvas juxtaposed through color, shapes, space & connection. "As the world is trying to recalibrate and figure out what their lives look like post pandemic, my paintings are also returning to a space where instead of being separated, we are connecting again. Color is a language, and I hope the colors and the connectivity gives humanity a bit of hope and joy"

Mary Valverde, “I consider myself a cultural practitioner with a focus on visual arts and research. Traveling with my family to diverse communities in Ecuador while growing up, my recent visits to my New Orleans with my own family, and a very important visit to the Institute of American Indian Art in New Mexico fostered my investment in researching the cross sector of influence and exchange between Indigenous and African communities in the Americas.”  Valerde centers her work and research on the historic and present-day connection between these two communities: Specifically, the effects of their histories, the on-going evolution, adjustments, inventions and shifts of culture, visual arts and language. How we keep, modify, and adjust our visual culture to maintain and acknowledge our roots through the abstraction of traditional systems, the use of patterns, and codes. The language of math, geometry and science is imprinted in the rhythm of our textiles, our speech, and organized spaces. “My work reflects and responds to my research on how these patterns and rhythms interact and are composed.” On view, Huaca Angles is comprised of painted boards, each 9 x 12 inches, creating 9 panels of 8 pieces in this final design. Like most of Valverde’s installations this one is symmetrical. They are double-sided panels. Each board is painted in a pattern and palette inspired by pre-Columbian textiles; reds, browns, yellows, on one side and on the underbelly more organic gestural gold marks. The panels are independent of each other so that pieces can peek and fold in distinct arrangements to create connections between the panels, forming different patterns, shadows, and passages.“Huaca Angles, like most of my installation works it is meant to be reconfigured and re installed in response to the space. So, in theory it can expand or contract depending on the floor space provided.”The four works on paper are part of Valverde’s process of working through larger concepts, imaging arrangements, palettes, and additional projects. 

More on exhibiting artists:

Felix Carmelo Rios (b. 1968) Arecibo, Puerto Rico. In 1997 he moved to Miami, Florida where he lives and works. His work reveals an intense aesthetic gaze, forged in an endless search for form’s intrinsic beauty. The study of languages derived from geometric abstraction and associated with minimalism has given him the expressive tools to carry out an artistic proposal that fulfills this fundamental interest. Nevertheless, Rios practice is not merely analytical, it looks to recreate the encounter with pure forms and the rhythms that their relationships produce-chasing the apparent chaos of the surrounding reality.  

Guillermo Garcia Cruz is one Uruguay’s youngest and most important artists. His work has been exhibited individually at the Contemporary Art Space in Montevideo, and internationally in exhibitions in Lima, Buenos Aires, Miami, Washington DC, New York, Madrid, Lisbon and Tianjin. Among other articles and mentions, in 2019 he has been globally distinguished among the 12 artists in the focus of the next generation, by the Ibero-American site Arte Informado. He currently works between the cities of Madrid, NY, Montevideo and Lima, developing an interdisciplinary body of work that is made up of painting, photography, action and installation, pursuing a problematic look at the phenomenon of validation in the current contemporary art system. In addition, he works as Professor of the Visual Arts Degree at the Catholic University of Montevideo.

Marisol Martinez  has lived in Paris, Miami and Los Angeles. She earned her BBA in Design/Art Marketing from Parsons School of Design, having attended both New York and Paris campuses. She is a painter who contrasts both through color and subject matter, often spatial as well as prismatic. Broader inspiration follows a family lineage of women whose creativity encouraged Martinez to express herself visually. Artist influences such as Carmen Herrera, Agnes Martin, Alma Thomas, Luchita Hurtado and Josef Albers are deeply faceted components in her process and work. Martinez has exhibited in North American and is currently on view at Sugar Hill Museum, featured in the LatinX Project and upcoming Abstraction Show in Geneva curated by Tariku Shefiraw in July. In addition to painting, Martinez was a feature writer for UNDO magazine, an alternative wellness magazine, where she focuses on subjects tackling mental health.

Mary Valverde (b. 1975) Queens, New York. Mary Valverde received her MFA at University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999. Valverde teaches at Hunter College. Since 215 she serves as Commissioner (Sculptor seat) for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York and often contributes as an advisor to the NYC Depart of Cultural Affairs, Percent for Arts Program. Valverde is the 2021-22 Artist in Residence at The Latinx Project at NYU; 2021 CCSRE Mellon Art’s Practitioner Fellows, at Stanford University; 2023 forthcoming residence at the McCall Center for Art and Innovation in NC. Valverde has lectured at the Americas Society, NY; U.S. Latinx Forum; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; the US Latinx Arts Futures Symposium; Ford Foundation and has exhibited her work at The Latinx Arts Futures Symposium; Ford Foundation, and has exhibited her work at The Latinx Project, BRIC, Smack Mellon, MoCA North Miami, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Art Center South Florida, El Museo del Barrio, The Queens Museum of Art among others.KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to announce KIMBERLY PEPPERONI'S CLOSET, Kevin Sabo’s first solo presentation in New York City, on view during the 2022 Pride Month, between June 17 and July 23. Taking place as the culmination of his residency with the gallery, the show features the queer artist’s drag alter ego, Kimberly Pepperoni’s inner sanctum. Sabo’s queer figures burst out, both stylish and stylized, powerful and special, like the show’s namesake, Kimberly Hart–the kickass female Pink Power Ranger from the 1990s kids show “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.”

Artworks on View   Available Works on Artsy