KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to present FENCESCAPES, the first New York solo exhibition from Ecuadorian-American artist Francisco Donoso on view from November 10th to December 17th, with an artist reception on November 11th, 2022. The exhibition consists of a monumental site-specific mural plus 11 paintings and drawings in acrylic, ink, spray paint and colored pencil on mylar, which are mounted on fluorescent plexiglass supports. Donoso’s FENCESCAPES is an exploration of the psychic space - the interiority of the immigrant, shifting the citizen’s gaze away from the exterior trauma of migration and towards the liberated joy of a boundless futurity. 

A recipient of DACA, originally from Ecuador, but raised and residing in the US (Miami/NYC), Donoso uses the cyclone fence (chain-link) to take viewers beyond common assumptions about migration and borders, introducing us to a multiverse of experiences arising from the conditions of being undocumented in the United States today. With abstracted references to landforms, bodies of water and the celestial, Donoso collapses simplistic binaries of here/there, in/out by creating what feels like outer space and under water at the same time. 

The mixed-media works in FENCESCAPES explore luminosity as transcendence not only through paint material, but also through the richly-layered semi-transparent mylar surfaces (front and back), and glowing plexiglass that it’s mounted on. Each diamond of the fence becomes a magic carpet that carries us further into the artist's liberated mindscape -- a territory that is consciously uncolonizable. Reappropriating the fence for his own purposes, Donoso opens a vast array of possibilities for relating with culturally and politically imposed categories - immigration status, gender, race. Through his deep investigation of the fence, the artist reaches through it, stretches it, and digs under it -- queering its form and shaking it till it dances.  Featured in this exhibition is “Cosmic Retreat”, where the fence emerges from, and dissolves into, a softly layered atmospheric ground created by working both sides of the mylar. In it the chain-links become portals to psychedelic realms, and support for winding lines that recall waterfalls, ligaments and winding pathways. 

Varying in size from intimate colored pencil drawings to a wall-sized painting, FENCESCAPES leads us through an imaginary realm that peers down into the atomic scale then blows us out into the cosmos. Flowing lines, pours and splashes connect with moments of intense, tight patterning, awakening us to the collision of pure kinesis and dedicated practice that shape the human experience. FENCESCAPES takes us over the wall and through the looking glass, offering us all refuge in a painted realm that is both inextricably linked to the artist’s lived experience and unbounded by perceived limitations. As Donoso puts it, “boundaries exist to amplify, not restrict.”

Francisco Donoso (b.1988) is a transnational artist based between NYC and Miami. Originally from Ecuador, but raised in Miami, FL, he's been a recipient of DACA since 2013. He received his BFA from Purchase College and has participated in fellowships and residencies at Wave Hill as a Van Lier Fellow, Stony Brook University, The Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace, and the Kates-Ferri Projects Residency among others. Francisco has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US notably at El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of Arts, Children's Museum of Manhattan, Wave Hill, Affordable Art Fair, Field Projects, Second Street Gallery, Baik+Khnessyer, and SPRING/BREAK LA. He is a recipient of an Artist Corp Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Cultural Solidarity Fund Grant. His work is in corporate and many private collections like Capital One Collection and Memorial Sloan Kettering Collection. 

Donoso’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, CRUSHfanzine, The Latinx Project Intervenxions, The Financial Times, The Village Voice, and Art Zealous among others. He is the founder of The Undocu Spark Lab, a creative incubator and nomadic classroom for undocumented artists. He is represented by Kates-Ferri Projects in NYC. 

Exhibition Catalogue Artworks on View       Available Works on Artsy Available Works on ArtLand Exhibition on YouTube