Carlos Rosales-Silva | Sun Kiss

About

Known for his bold, abstract compositions that contend with postcolonial visual culture, Rosales-Silva creates mixed-media paintings that are destabilizing explorations of color, texture, and shape. 

The works in Sun Kiss range from immersive to intimately scaled, produced both in situ at the gallery and during Rosales-Silva’s recent visits to New Mexico. The two site-specific murals were designed and painted by the artist specifically for the exhibition, continuing his exploration of how form and color operate at monumental scales, this time in the context of the gallery’s architecture.  Conversely, the smaller paintings in the exhibition were produced primarily while he was in residence in Las Cruces, New Mexico, not far from his childhood home and near the militarized Mexican-American border. The vernacular architecture of that region inspires the stucco-like impasto of Rosales-Silva’s works, which he produces by blending crushed stone and tiny glass beads into acrylic pigments, creating a highly saturated, matte, textured surface. 

The environment of the Mexico-U.S. border is also a primary source of Rosales-Silva’s visual language and his practice of cultural and formal abstraction. His compositions echo the hybridity of border spaces, blending man-made and natural, geometric and biomorphic, real and imagined elements into unified compositions.  Figure and ground are rarely legible or stable categories in his work, as colors contrast and merge in unexpected combinations. Each field of color exists entirely in relation to those around it, legible only through relationships of interdependence. 

This understanding of color theory mirrors Rosales-Silva’s understanding of formal inspiration and citation. He writes, “I often think of my paintings as an ongoing research project of visual citation. In a lot of ways postcolonial theory is the practice of citation, revealing the consequences of colonial and imperial rule, which are ongoing… For me, a critical engagement with modern and contemporary painting is a way to cite influences by Indigenous cultures that have remained uncited and used as raw material.”  The works in Sun Kiss reinterpret forms from Art Nouveau furniture, to Mexican Modernist architecture, to Chicano arts murals, all of which drew upon Indigenous sources. Brought together in Rosales-Silva’s hybrid lexicon, they inform and intertwine with one another, producing an alluring state of disorientation that confronts contemporary cultures of extraction and isolation.