This Saturday, April 15th, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is holding a closing reception for Sinclair Vicisitud: “I write on walls to talk to you (The Shape of the Throat Croaks),” the Los Angeles artist’s debut solo exhibition.
The immediate physicality embodied by Vicisitud’s work takes-over and entirely transforms the gallery-space. Anyone who enters will find themselves burrowing through sedimented layers of love, memory, delirium, and clairvoyance. The exhibition initially surfaces through excruciating recollections of crushing loss and unresolved doubt, but ultimately serves as a remedy for its own plagues. Intermittently rising from darkness, sudden moments of ecstasy pulsate the room with blooming colors and unclouded visions. This oeuvre is a fearless work with split identities that, nevertheless, come-together to hold each other up. An entire world, an entire population, emerges from Vicisitud’s works—whispering behind the walls.
In Papa (2023), the work presents a nocturne portrait of the artist’s father as an envoy into the afterlife of the living image. While painted from life, there is an evanescent, self-eclipsing view of the figure as it passes almost entirely out of sight in a vertical passage from the burnt celestial glow above to the drowning black below. Effortlessly, but quietly exhausted, the father bears the weight of holding-up the entire space. This is evident in the flattened geometry of the father’s body, which sharply contrasts with the thick, swirling impasto strokes of the face and hands. The weighted, edged shape of the gently slumped body becomes an architecture beyond or between its figural placement; rather, the body blends into the sheer dimensionality of the surface, becoming the space of painting itself. By leaving the uncut edges of the canvas as uneven, supple, and tattered limits, the borders of the canvas extend in erratic and unpredictable ways like a body.
While the father’s body becomes the surface of the canvas, the material of the canvas takes on the figural form of the father’s body: worn and sullied, but upright and extensive. The structural force of the father in this painting is echoed by its architectural positioning in the gallery-space upon the exhibition’s central pillar. Though, despite being positioned with the rigor of a monumental sitter, the structural effect of the body does not harden the figure’s subtle posture. The spectral traces and slight changes in tones and textures of black, along with the ghostly remains of the father’s hands placed in his lap, suggest a missing movement and a lost passage of time that ultimately brings this work to the rim of a dream—or the horizon of a memory. Resting on the brink of an eternal night, this painting lives at the end of an era (and the beginning of a new world).
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Sinclair Vicisitud is a (born-and-raised) Los Angeles artist who has previously exhibited in group shows at Wönzimer gallery. Their first solo exhibition is presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles. Vicisitud’s paintings are both autobiographical and allegorical, equivocally drawn-out from life, literature, and split mythologies.
Working in oil, acrylic, charcoal, and mixed-media, Vicisitud’s figural, expressive work usually takes-place through a practice of painting that interweaves gestural imprints and studied forms. However, this surface-process is often navigated through the multi-dimensional, sculptural features of the canvas or frame. At times, their (initially) painterly work is totally transformed into a sculptural object.
Beginning with their (chosen) name, their work takes the form of a rattling against the strictures of their own perceived identity. They work with themself as the place of an otherness, an errancy—a churning between darkness and light. Their raw, hauntingly expressive work shifts and moves, but always re-finds its footing through the brutal honesty of their practice: working with what they have, when they have it, and while they can.
